DgtizeD

My new complaint has to do with the yum installer. Yum apparently stands for yellowdog update manager, which is a quick giveaway that it wasn’t even originally designed for fedora core. This is a retrofitted advancement for fedora.

So I have been going through a variety of installati
ons on a couple of matching boxes on my desk. I discovered that FC3’s latest update to there kernel, 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3 totally fails to boot on any smp system anyone has found. I’m not quite sure I understand the product testing system if it is unusable on any platform, but this is the least of my problems. For a variety of other reasons I need the kernel-devel package which provides the source of the currently installed kernel. Unfortuneatly as far as I can dtermine, yum only lists the latest kernel-devel packages in it’s repository. This is because yum is designed only to update things. Apparently the idea that an update might not be applicable/work is a foreign concept for this tool. Is it really that difficult to support some type of version management? Doesn’t the ability to roll back to a working state, even package by package seem like a useful requirement?

I have since discovered that the way for me to update my system is apparently to specifically exclude the kernel and kernel-smp package unless I want to go in and edit the bootloader file to ensure that I can still boot. Nicely enough when manually excluding packages it doesn’t automatically remove packages that depend on the packages that were excluded.

This is all excluding the fact that yum isn’t even usable on FC3 after install because the gpg keys aren’t installed by default. It’s not like the gpg keys are for random weird sites either, no they are for the standard sites provided by FC3 by default with the installation.

There seems to be some sort of way to retarget the add/remove program manager, at least to a dvd iso image, given that none of the disk images seem to work all the way through. Not sure if it can be retargeted at a network package source though, which seems to be the only reliable way to install packages. Unfortuneatly it also seems to have major issues if any of the packages have been updated since the original install cd was mastered. Which means the add/remove function only works reliably the first time the machine is booted after install.

I REALLY don’t understand why people seem to like yum and fedora core so much. Debian does some things that annoy me with licensing, and certainly some annoying things with dev packages, not to mention the way they absolutely gut ruby’s standard library, but at least for the most part it’s installer and packages seem to work. It feels like everyone in fedora land loves yum simply because it’s such an improvement over dealing with rpm dependency hell by hand, manually downloading each package. As for rpm’s and fedora core itself, I don’t understand the attraction at all. Anaconda sometimes seems to do a nice job of auto detecting hardware, but it’s only part of the time. Does anyone know why people actually like fedora core?