[ILUG] yum and apt gurus, please read

[Timothy Murphy]

On Sun 01 May 2005 12:21, kevin lyda wrote:

> not to single this response out, but could yum, apt and other users of
> such tools quit giving half answers like this?  "point it at the irish
> yum mirrors" is not useful.  i've seen other answers like "put sid in
> your sources.list" or "add dag to your yum/apt config."

I completely agree with Kevin on this -:
not necessarily about yum,
but about advice in general on this and other lists.

People seem very reluctant to just repeat the commands they gave,
or action they took,
Instead they write an essay which basically assumes you understand
what is required anyway.

I'd better add my /etc/yum.conf - 
which I think this must be the default one gets on Fedora-3 
if you just install yum from the rpm.
==============================================
[tim at alfred ~]$ cat /etc/yum.conf
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
exclude=kernel*

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d
==============================================
And here is my /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
which is probably the relevant file:
==============================================
[tim at alfred ~]$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/
baseurl=http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/$basearch/os/
http://ftp.esat.net/pub/linux/fedora/3/$basearch/os/
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
==============================================
I keep a local copy of the update repository using the program "yam" nightly,
so this is my /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
==============================================
[tim at alfred ~]$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=file:///var/yam/fc3-i386/updates/
#http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/3/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
==============================================
Or on other machines I have
==============================================
c[tim at martha ~]$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=http://alfred/yam/fc3-i386/updates/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
==============================================

I didn't mean to say all that! - I just wanted to agree with Kevin.

Incidentally, yum is a marvelous program when it works,
which is about 98% of the time.
But when it doesn't, the error messages are not very helpful.
Eg heanet's Fedora-3 feed was down recently,
but it wasn't at all clear to me that this was the problem.

There must be a slight error in my /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo above,
as I thought this would go on to the esat feed if the heanet feed failed,
but it didn't seem to.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland