It's not often that I complain about Linux. I REALLY love my FC4/FC5 home computer and am happier than a pig in muck that I finally am using SUSE at work and never have to deal with the OS whose name should not be uttered. But you know, sometimes....
I had a long day at work today; over 12 hours and when I got home I grabbed some cold brews and sat myself down in front my Linux box to work on forgetting about today and preping myself for tomorrow. I popped in a music CD and fired up Xmms, fired up Aisle Riot for some solitaire, connected to the internet to get updated and the world was a beautiful place.
Except for yum. I know Void's feelings about yum, but I'm no elite hacker (l337 H4x0r). Heck, I had to switch from Windows to Linux because I was too stupid to keep a Windows computer running and get any work done with one. So, beginning with FC5, I followed the recommendations of the good folks at RedHat/Fedora who have been good enough to give me super software for free for years and have been faithfully using yum to do my updates since
OK, so yum is slow. I can live with slow. Polite people tell me I'm slow, less polite people call me a moron, others have different ways of describing me. But anyway, back to yum.
I ran the simple (yeah, I get called simple too) "yum update" command. It kinda puked on a "checksums don't match" error on the metadata for my repositories. Then kept on searching for happy repositories. I let the darn thing run for about 15 minutes after I knew that it was yum that was hosed and not the repositories. No big deal. It was a running process, a simple ^C should have killed it and allowed me to fix this broken excuse for an updater. Nope. Didn't happen. I really thought that ^C was a real interrupt. Ok, so after a dozen or so ^C's I ran a "ps aux | grep yum" and kill the pid. Well that did work and a "yum clean all" unhosed yum and it went on to do its update thing.
But, you know, I really liked apt. Smart looks like it has a lot of possibilities. Way back when the Red Carpet updater, I think it was a Ximian product, was pretty nice. SUSE managed to seriously damage their YaST2 updater in OpenSUSE 10.1 to the point that I passed that upgrade up and ordered SLED 10 for work. A good, reliable dependency resolving updater/installer is necessary if Linux is ever going to displace Windows. Why can't the community just pick one and make it work. Reliably and easily. And, for those point-n-clickers who are moving to Linux (not me!) a nice simple GUI thing to play with.
OK, I'm done ranting. Besides I have to hit the 'fridge for some more cold brews.
Later,
Jim
