yum updates - size of downloads

[tashirosgt]

For those interested, I finally finished a
yum -y update
of a FC2 X86_64 ( custom installl, install everything ) on Aug 23,2004
It took several nights of starting and restarting my modem connection to finish this. The download seems to stall periodically.
There were 5594494 bytes of headers and 289613693 bytes of packages.

copied /var/cache/yum/updates-released/headers and /var/cache/yum/updates-released/packages to a cd and put them on a twin machine. Then I, after connecting to the isp via kpp, I ran yum -y update on it and things went very fast. It took only a few minutes. I emailed cheapbytes and suggested that they sell a cd of the updates.

Whatever the problems of downloading, I must say that yum works very gracefully to start from where it was interrupted and you hardly lose anything by disconnecting and reconnectiing (if you don't clean the yum cache directory).

[aditrus]

Question about Yum:

Is it ok to delete the /var/cache/yum files and subfolders when finished updating via yum? Are those files inside that directory needed when installed?

[tashirosgt]

I don't know. There is a "clean" option on yum that gets rid of things, but I am so happy to finally have all the stuff that I hesitate to remove it!

[Bana]

Yes, use yum clean all I believe and it will get rid of all the crusty cache automagically.

[Psquared]

What does the -y do when running yum?

[imdeemvp]

Originally Posted by Psquared

What does the -y do when running yum?

it means that when run with the -y option, yum will assume a ``yes'' answer to all interactive questions, this is typically used in a script or to process ``known safe'' installs or updates.

[zg0000]

Did anyone else have trouble with dependencies when running yum -y update? I've been a long time Mandrake user so I'm used to dependencies not being a problem, but the samba packages were complaining about dependencies not being met (actually, they wanted an earlier version of samba-common..3.03 I think). I finally got it to update by manually downloading all the updated samba packages and doing a forced install with rpm (rpm -ivh --force samba-*).

After that yum worked pretty good. I does seem a bit slower then yast or urpmi and pretty touchy (I'd be using Mandrake, but they've made a mess of the free 64 bit version).

Dag and Livonia archives are really life savers too.