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Fedora Update
By Jacob Cohen | July 4, 2008
The Fedora system has been running for a few days now. One minor annoyance I’ve encountered so far is the way the system uses yum. It’s not that I find yum to be a bad package manager. On the contrary, it is very easy to use. The problem comes from how yum will create a lock file whenever it is doing anything, and no other yum operation will proceed until that lock is available.
I can understand the purpose behind such a lock. After all, you wouldn’t want concurrent modification of the system’s picture of what is installed and what version everything is, and so on. However, the problem arises from the fact that the lock is held for absolutely everything. I started a routine system update, and it held the lock for the entire time it was downloading all the new packages. It was waiting for network data while holding an exclusive lock on the whole system.
It is generally considered best practice to hold an exclusive lock for the minimum amount of time necessary to ensure correct behavior. It seems yum is going far beyond this limitation and just trying to acquire the lock before anything happens at all.
Topics: General |
