yum versus apt

[Charles Jones]

Anyone want to talk about why they like yum versus apt or vice versa? :)

I like yum but I do have some gripes about it:

1. It would be nice if it would ping all of the mirrors and use the 
fastest one (or if RH would use some BGP magic or something to route you 
to the closest mirror (official mirrors anyhow)...then again they only 
have one official mirror don't they?
2. Why is it an "undocumented feature" that you can hit ctrl-c to skip 
to the next mirror (If a header or package download is going slow, you 
can hit ctrl-c and it will jump to the next mirror in the list and 
continue downloading)
3. It would be nice if yum showed which mirror it was downloading from, 
or even the list (you grab the list by hitting for example, 
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=i386)

P.S. I was just informed by a coworker that there is a yum plugin called 
"yum-plugin-fastestmirror", which seems to address my #1 gripe above. I 
found this info on it:
---snip---

Once the yum fastest mirror plugin is activated, whenever you perform 
yum update or install, you will get a better connection. As yum will 
search the mirror based on your IP thru the GeoIP system. Yum select the 
fastest mirror based on:-

1. The connecting location of the client.
2. The current freshness/staleness of the mirrors for that region.

---snip---

I guess I should stop griping, and learn how to write yum plugins  :)