Some thoughts about yum and repositories

Judging from recent discussions on this list, it seems that many are still confused about configuring their yum.conf files, and about all the different repositories out there. I was wondering what we, the Fedora community, might do to make this easier. I'm not so much thinking about documentation -- it seems to me that FedoraFAQ.org does a pretty good job of explaining stuff to people, however it still requires that they find it or look for it in the first place. I was wondering if there was something that could be done to yum itself (either the client program itself, or the format of yum repositories) to make this easier. Just off the top of my head, these things strike me as being potentially useful: 1. Yum repositories should have a mirrors.xml file. All the user need do is sign up to the main repository itself, the mirrors.xml file is downloaded, and yum tries to use the mirror that is closest or fastest (I'm not sure *how* it should do that, but lets think of this as an ideal scenario proposal). 2. Yum repositories should be able to announce that they are dependent on other yum repositories: if I sign up to Livna.org I am then automatically signed up to Fedora.us. 3. If 1. can be implemented, then I think the GPG key of the repository should automatically be installed -- because mirrors are determined automatically you only ever sign up to the main repository itself and so automatically retrieving its GPG key should be no more a security issue than manually adding it. 4. I shouldn't need to alter my yum.conf when I upgrade to a new version of FC -- yum should determine which version of FC I am running and automatically use the appropriate repositories (i.e. if I subscribe to rpm.livna.org when running FC2 and then I upgrade to FC3 yum should automatically start using livna's FC3 repository). 5. I should be able to subscribe to a repository from the command line without manually editing yum.conf (i.e. something like "yum subscribe rpm.livna.org"). 6. There should be some way of distinguishing between a repository that is part of Fedora Core, or Fedora Extras or Fedora Alternatives. Subscribing to a repository from Fedora Alternatives should warn the user of potential problems. I'm not sure quite how this should be done, but perhaps have something like "channels" which group repositories (and yum-arch should be altered so that you can't create a yum repository without declaring whether it is Core, Extras or Alternatives). 7. If 6. could be implemented, then "channels" should be able to advise you what other repositories there were in a channel, together with a short description of what the repository provided. This would aid people in finding the right repositories. If some of these things sound familiar that is because some of them are features of Red Carpet, my favourite software installer and manager. I would have liked to have seen red-carpet/rug/rcd adopted by Fedora Core, but (a) it seems hardly anyone else wanted that, and (b) it looks like Red Carpet may no longer be a standalone product but may have been entirely integrated into Novell ZenWorks for Unix. However, if yum got at least some of the above features I think it would be a vast improvement, and I suspect we would have less problems reported on this list. I'm really hoping some people might have other suggestions, or comments on what I've said above. Best, Darren -- ===================================================================== D. D. Brierton darren(a)dzr-web.com www.dzr-web.com Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson) =====================================================================