Yellow dog Updater, Modified

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Yellow dog updater, modified
Image:yum.png
Developer: Seth Vidal
OS: Linux
Use: package management
License: GNU GPL
Website: Yum website

The Yellow dog Updater, Modified (YUM) is a free software/open source command line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems. 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.

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 Fedora Core, CentOS, and many other RPM-based Linux distributions, including Yellow Dog Linux itself, where it has replaced the original YUP utility. Red Hat's own enterprise package manager, up2date, can also make use of yum repositories when performing software updates. Red Hat Enterprise 5 saw yum and pirut replace up2date in that distribution.

Automatic software update can be done with either the yum-updatesd or the yum-updateonboot packages.

Yum's repository system is quickly becoming 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.

Yellow dog Updater, Modified is available under the GNU GPL license version 2 or above.

Contents

[edit] Yum Repositories

Creation of yum repositories is handled by a separate tool called "createrepo", which generates the necessary XML metadata.

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

[edit] Plug-in/Module System

In the 2.x versions of yum, an interface for programming extensions in Python has been added which allows the behavior of yum to be altered.

[edit] Graphical Interfaces

  • Pirut - default Fedora Core GUI as of Fedora Core 5
  • Pup - Package Updater Fedora Core GUI
  • Yum Extender - Fedora Extras GUI for Yum
  • KYum - GUI for Yum on KDE

[edit] External links