Comments on: Yum, It’s Starting to Get Tasty

By: robinbowes

robinbowes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

"This is where Leonidas starts to show its prowess over Cambridge as removing all 15 packages was over 4 seconds faster."

Hrm, 28 secs vs. 32 secs.

Hardly earth-shattering, is it?

By: voidmain

voidmain — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As a Debian/Ubuntu/Mint user, a comparison with APT (what we debs consider the current king of package management) would be nice.

By: robinbowes

robinbowes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

PS. The comment count is one out.

I see two comments, yet the title says "3 comments on Yum..."

*This* is the third comment!

By: jsilve1

jsilve1 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is this article interesting to anyone? It is not poorly written, it is just about as dull as you can get. The subject matter is dull, I guess, but even that could have been made more interesting by comparing it to the other mentioned package manages (urpmi, Zypper, Apt-get, et. al.), perhaps. Or maybe just having this article be a subsection in a larger article about Fedora 11.

Sometimes, Linux-Mag, you are just plain boring. Sorry. True.

By: hallmarc

hallmarc — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Clearly Mr. Smart does not know how to conduct performance analyses. Yes, this article may give the casual user a sense of “Leonidas has improved things,” but it’s hardly useful for anything else. Does anyone actually need to see the output of _yum_ and _time_ for this article? No. That space is better utilized by giving us a single table with the relevant statistics. And please, show us percentages, e.g., the removal of mono represents a 13% improvement, and _always_ conduct multiple test runs to increase the validity of your findings (be careful to avoid caching effects). I would argue in this case that wall clock time is the only thing that matters to the majority of Linux Magazine readers, because they are not doing massive package installs and uninstalls on a regular basis. The sys time would be important if yum were constantly updating packages in the background and hammering CPU capacity…but it doesn’t.

By: ctryon

ctryon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve used Fedora since, well, since it was still called Red Hat, and one of the very few things that I really hate in the distribution is the horrendous Add/Remove Software GUI they run on top of RPM/yum. It’s so bad I don’t even remember what it is called, since I always use the command line. I’m not sure why they can’t take a simple look at the package manager in either Ubuntu or SUSE, either one of which is light-years ahead of the Fedora manager. The search function is useless, and even if you find something, it doesn’t tell you much about what the packages are. If you actually install something, it doesn’t give you any feedback as to what is happening (if anything IS happening), or even what dependencies it’s installing for you! Some of this may be related to the underlying meta-data that the RPM system supplies compared to what is in the DEB packages.

Making RPM a little faster is always a good thing, but I’d like to see an overhaul of what the user actually does to interact with the packaging system