I found myself explaining Yum recently, and thought that it would make a good posting. What is Yum and why do I want to use it instead of RPM? The short answer is you use it with RPM.

Yum is Yellow Dog Updater – Modified. It can best be described as everything you wish RPM was, but never got around to becoming. See here for more about Yum.

Yum’s key strength is that when you attempt to install a package with it, it will determine the dependency chain, fetch all the dependencies, and build & install them in the right order prior to installing the package you originally attempted to install. Packages are fetched from a Yum repository, which you point to in your local Yum configuration.

RPM, while very useful, generally does nothing to satisfy dependencies. It will simply report that you have a list of dependencies, that when installed themselves from RPM may have their own dependencies, and so on… this is known as RPM Hell.

You can avoid RPM Hell by using Yum.

Tags: yum, rpm, configuration, package management

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