Yellow dog Updater, Modified

Yellow dog Updater, Modified

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Yellow dog Updater, Modified

PackageKit is now the default package manager on Fedora

A screenshot from Yum Extender in Fedora 8

The Yellow dog Updater, Modified (YUM) is an open source command line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems and has been released under the GNU General Public License. It was developed by Seth Vidal and a group of volunteer programmers, and is currently maintained as part of Duke University's Linux@DUKE project. Though yum is a command line utility, several other tools provide graphical user interfaces to yum, among them pup, pirut, and yumex. Seth Vidal now works for Red Hat and a number of other Red Hat programmers are involved in the development of yum.

Yum is a full rewrite of its predecessor tool, Yellowdog Updater (YUP), and was developed primarily in order to update and manage Red Hat Linux systems used at the Duke University department of Physics. Since then, it has been adopted by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, and many other RPM-based Linux distributions, including Yellow Dog Linux itself, where it has replaced the original YUP utility.

Automatic software update can be done with yum-updatesd, the yum-updateonboot package, the yum-cron package or using PackageKit.

Yum's XML repository system was built with input from many other developers and has quickly become the standard for RPM-based repositories. Besides the distributions that use Yum directly, SUSE Linux 10.1 adds support for Yum repositories in YaST, and the openSUSE Build Repository is exclusively Yum-based.

However Yum has moved to a dual approach in its repositories, where .sqlite metadata database files are directly downloaded. This is a significant optimisation.

Automatic metadata syncing
Yum repositories
Plug-in/module system
Graphical interfaces
External links

Automatic metadata syncing

One of Yum's biggest advantages over its competition is that it automatically synchronizes the remote metadata to the local client, with other tools opting to just give the user a command to synchronize. Having the synchronization be automatic means that yum cannot fail due to the user failing to run a command at the correct interval.

Yum repositories

Creation of yum repositories is handled by a separate tool called "createrepo", which generates the necessary XML metadata (and the sqlite metadata if given the -d option).

The mrepo tool (formerly known as Yam) can help in the creation and maintenance of repositories.