Plugging Yum

For those of us who manage RPM systems (in my case, various flavors of Red Hat ) there's always been a bit of meloncholoy about some of the magical capabilities of Debian's magical APT system. Yes there's AptRpm but that always seemed a bit Rube Goldbergish to me. Of course Red Hat now has the Red Hat Network and up2date. It's a pure RPM solution but unless you use something like Current you're pretty much locked in to what Red Hat thinks are a reasonable set of packages and updates. I have used Current by the way and it's an excellent project, just a bit fussy to set up.

What I've become rather fond of is Yum the yellowdog updater, modified. Dead simple to install on a server and client. Not the speediest of the lot. But it doesn't require any magic at all, just the Red Hat maintained Python bindings for RPM. It's easy enoough that even in situations like where I work where I run pretty much the only Red Hat box on the network, I'll create a Yum repository with the Red Hat install CDs and a judicous use of wget —mirror of updates.redhat.com. Then I've got the convenience of a simple yum install package which will grab the package and install it and any of it dependencies. Nice, simple, easy an reliable. Can't beat that.