[SATLUG] Re: Yum considered harmful for compiling your own software?

[Robert Pearson]

On Nov 2, 2007 9:14 AM, Sean Carolan <scarolan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is one of the most frustrating aspects of YUM, IMHO.  We have a
> > very good reason for wanting to stick with the 2.6.18-8 kernel, yet
> > yum likes to download the latest version of kernel-headers and
> > kernel-devel, which are completely useless to me.  Is there some way
> > to force yum to behave and actually install the supporting files for
> > my current kernel???
>
> I fixed this by disabling the "updates" repo in my yum.conf.  The
> package manager should at least be able to figure out that "yum
> install kernel-headers" means to get the header files for my currently
> running kernel, not the one I don't even have installed!  Apt handles
> this much better than yum, IMHO.
>
> --

Could this be a bug in yum?
Was the "update" repository line at or near the top of the yum.conf?
I would think the default behavior for any package manager should be
to interpret "update", "upgrade" and "install" a "specific package
name" correctly. Especially if it checks and finds they are not
installed. If they are installed it should tell you and then ask what
you want to do. Or it could just print a "The package you have
requested is already installed" and exit leaving you to figure out
what you want to do and how.
On Redhat systems I always had to use a combination of apt-get, rpm
and yum depending on what I was doing. On some rare occasions only the
old Redhat "up2date" would work.

Maybe we are lucky to have package managers that work as good as they do?
The two best I have seen are Debian dpkg and SuSE YaST2 and I have
seen both of them become confused.
I'm not sure how much difference the "deb" vs. "rpm" database management makes.

OS vendors don't see package managers as "value add" software.
Certainly not on free OS software.


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