journal/notes

This email was pointed out to me today. I do enjoy people who are not yum developers (or even working on any kind of packaging development) claim to understand the motivations as to why features were added to yum. I think a prereq for claiming to know any of my motivations is to be inside my head at the time I was thinking about it.

So much.

For the record here are the set of reasons why yum shell was added to yum:

- allow users to stack commands to deal with all sorts of interesting packaging issues (like trying to remove sendmail and install postfix in a single command - a common issue with rhl 7.2, 7.3, etc

- provide interface for doing scripted sets of commands that needed to occur in a single transaction for a variety of reasons

- to speed up repeated calls to the exact same setup functions. It takes a certain amount of time to call up python and the libs yum requires along with all the repo checking, etc. With the yum shell addition it removed the repeated setup expense for repetitive operations. Even the fastest program needs to do some setup to check its state.

- last, but not least, I wanted to play with the ‘cmd’ module in python and I thought this would be a neat use for it.

I don’t think any of the above are “cop outs”.

” yum devel is an excellent remedy to ever thinking too highly of yourself”

- Seth Vidal