[WBEL-users] More yum mirrors?

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday 27 April 2004 10:19, William Hooper wrote:
> I for one would be very ticked off if the up2date package hijacks my
> well-configured sources file.

If you drop the (noreplace) from %config, you still can use your 'well-tuned' 
configuration by copying the .rpmsave file back in.  But you can't have it 
both ways; this would be a decision for the greater good of the whole 
userbase and would be something that would have to be carefully thought out.  
I'm certainly not advocating temporarily dropping the %config altogether 
(which would silently overwrite the existing config).  I have had to do this 
for PostgreSQL before, and the pain was felt, but it was a necessary change.

> Remember, yum and apt are supported now, so assuming that only the
> official repos are configured is a bad assumption.

There _are_ no (zero!) good assumptions.  There are only bad assumptions and 
increasingly worse assumptions.

Which is the path of the least pain across the whole userbase?  There is going 
to be some pain no matter what, and it sounds like you are more prepared for 
the pain than the newbie who won't know how to look for the .rpmnew file (if 
they know that much, they would have already configured their mirrors 
properly (although that's possibly a bad assumption, too)).

Is it simpler to tell the newbie to copy in the .rpmnew or to tell the clueful 
to copy back their .rpmsave?  I _know_ who will be the most vocal, but the 
most vocal != a majority.  The question is which one will have the greatest 
likelihood of being consistently executed for the benefit of the distribution 
infrastructure.

The fact is that there is a problem with the use of the beau.org master; 
getting people to copy in a .rpmnew is going to be just as difficult as 
getting them to change to a mirror in the first place (even though the copy 
operation is a simpler one; getting the mirror is as simple as uncommenting 
and commenting out lines....)

What is best for WhiteBox Linux the project?  (getting people to use a 
mirror).  How do we best do this to get consistent and enforceable execution? 
(force an update of the sources lists for up2date and yum)  How do we do this 
the most reliably? (drop noreplace, then reenable no replace at the next rev 
at some future point).  That's the technical; but there will have to be some 
communication of it happening.  And it might still miss some people who 
update very infrequently.

IMHO.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu