[PLUG] yum on CentOS-5.3

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

I used to be a Red Hat guy, way back when it was actually called "Red 
Hat".  But I got tired of the reinstalls for upgrades and the general 
hassles with RPM.  Then yum came among, and it was *so* much better, but 
I still ended up switching to Debian, and I've been much happier. 
Debian just makes sense to me in a way that Red Hat never really did.

I use a lot of RHEL at work, but it's almost all old, mostly 3 and a 
little 4 and I don't maintain those machines.  But I was building a 
server for some testing today, and using CentOS-5.3, and I was really 
pleased with how much yum has improved.  It's still no aptitude, but...

It used to take *forever* to do *anything* because it would effectively 
do an 'aptitude update' every time you did anything.  That was useful 
for keeping the package lists up-to-date, but a bad trade-off for 
usability I though.  It seems to be a lot smarter about that these days.

It automatically went off by itself and found the fastest mirror, which 
was cool.

Its "whatprovides" function is much better and it downloads the various 
file lists it needs for that on first use, which is cool.

So I was pleasantly surprised by the improvements...  (I absolutely 
loath the abomination that was the RH up-to-date disaster.  I never once 
got that to actually work, and I was very happy when they dumped it for 
yum.)


On the other hand, I also did a remote upgrade of Debian Etch to Lenny 
today and that Just Freakin' Worked.  I'd never try that on RHEL...  And 
I still don't trust 'yum remove' to really remove everything like I 
trust 'aptitude purge' but certainly anything is better than Windows 
Add/Pretend-to-remove.

Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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