[Dextrose] upgrading XOs

[Steven Parrish]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> 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/
>
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What Bernie says is correct.  by limiting the upgrade functionality to
just the dextrose repo should solve any issues with yum and oom.

I am looking at having this available is os6 due for release on 03dec.

Steven