It can be quite discouraging to type “yum update” and have
yum simply go off forever. Among other things, one must wait a great
long time to distinguish this behavior from yum’s normal mode of
operation. Other times, it comes back very quickly with a message
saying, for all practical purposes, “RPM crashed, you lose,
sorry.”
via LWN.net (subscription
required)
Jonathan Corbet normally manages to amuse me on a weekly basis, but
this time he’s outdone himself. Consider my LWN.net subcription renewed
for another year.
Update: I;ve been convinced to include a subscriber
link to the article for those without LWN.net subscriptions. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/210373/8badbe4f9c463fb8/
on said:
Keep in mind that LWN encourages posting of subscriber links for various purposes, including commenting on stories in a blog. You might consider posting such a link when referencing an LWN story. This in fact encourages people to subscribe, as the linked page will include a notice about the use of subscriber link feature, and an offer for a discounted initial subscription.
on said:
Thank $deity for apt. Why distros still are doing the sandbox “my shovel” thing and don’t adopt it all over the board is the strangest thing ever. Well, at least they get their daily punishment for being stubborn, thanks to yum.
on said:
I know this isn’t really a common use-case, but when I was investigating Xen last I used to create lots of micro-VMs, with 16M of memory each. This was not enough to invoke yum.
on said:
I think the comments in this bug illustrate some of the underlying ‘problems’ with rpm maintenance mentioned in the lwn article:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119185