[Dextrose] upgrading XOs

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 13:14 -0600, David Farning wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Sascha Silbe
> <sascha-ml-reply-to-2010-3 at silbe.org> wrote:
> > Excerpts from David Farning's message of Thu Oct 28 03:09:20 +0200 2010:
> >
> >> When upgrading to dextrose why don't we use 'yum update' to update the
> >> the core sugar package?  That seems simpler then carrying around a usb
> >> stick and disrupting class.
> >
> > Others might provide more detailed information, but here's a summary:
> > Because - at least for Fedora 9 based builds - yum requires more RAM
> > than is available on XO-1. In at least some of the cases, it won't work
> > properly, but still continue (leaving the user to believe everything
> > went fine).
> 
> Ahh, that is not good.

> Another thought is the the problem with yum is that it was never
> optimized for low memory situations.  It was originally conceived as a
> way to keep servers up to date.  We might be able to prune the repos
> down to only the necessary files.  IIRC yum creates a rather large
> python data structure for every available package.

Yum's memory, bandwidth and cpu usage grows more or less linearly with
the number of packages in the repositories.

Therefore, the ultimate solution to all these problems is to disable the
huge fedora repositories, as I said in my last mail:

  yum --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=dextrose update

This will be blazingly fast and won't break on the XO-1 even when a
bunch of activities are running.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/