4 ms·

I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it

I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I've interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite been the same without him, but I occasionally think of him when using yum. I wish they'd keep the yum name, since dnf is still based on yum, even if a lot of the innards have been replaced. Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud.

DAddYE 12y ago
I never had a chance to interact with him but I share the same feeling. I'm probably too an old fool but I really liked YUM.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I suspect he would have been right out front on integrating these new ideas into yum; he had a long history of pushing yum forward (which is why it became the standard for RHEL and Fedora despite Red Hat having developed one of their own; but, it was clear to everyone, including Red Hat, that up2date was inferior in every way to yum). So, I tend to think if he were still around, we wouldn't be talking about something replacing yum, we would instead be talking about new features in yum. I think it is unfortunate that people felt the need to fork rather than enhance.
hyperrail 12y ago
> Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud. Indeed, to me, saying "dnf" out loud suggests "did not finish," which is the opposite of what you want from a package repository tool!
- bgilroy26 12y ago
  Did not find [package]!
- Natsu 12y ago
  Well, they eventually did finish Duke Nukem: Forever, right?
  - Retra 12y ago
    Well, they released it anyway. :P
pjbrunet 12y ago
Be careful out there... http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/thank-you-seth-vidal http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/thank-you-seth-vidal http://www.wral.com/man-charged-in-durham-hit-and-run-that-killed-bicyclist/12644209/ http://www.wral.com/man-charged-in-durham-hit-and-run-that-k...
mpdehaan2 12y ago
Ditto. I mess Seth a great amount and this too makes me sad a bit -- though his code and advice lives on in scores of people. His belief in Ansible being a decent idea really kept me going with it after the first 2 months or so, otherwise I might not have continued it as a side project, and over the course of several years, he helped me a ton with various issues and was an amazing sounding board, including sharing a lot of advice when I as being plagued by nuisance CVE reports and wondering what to do about them. We had occasional arguments and he was usually right, and we always resolved things. (We had also previously worked on Func together with Adrian Likins, who wrote most of up2date, which was also a great experience - Seth knocked out most of the fun SSL parts). Back then used to meet around Duke to come up with crazy patent ideas to supplement our low Red Hat salaries (mine was anyway), and ... yeah, so much fun. At his service, what was super amazing was pretty much everyone said the same thing about how he had helped them, dozens upon dozens of people, and it was really one of the most moving things I've ever seen. One of the few that made you come out saying "whoa" and wanting to be a better person and care about helping other people more than I did. And I think I did. Or I'm trying hard to. Seth got a lot of hell for yum and shared many of my frustrations with the nature of the OSS community at times, but I still prefer it than a lot of idioms in apt. Things like yumdownloader, createrepo, --enablerepo, --disablerepo, and many things like it, just made it click for me, and it worked so well. And working with people like him at Red Hat made it really feel special to be there and to be able to learn from them. I think about him every time I run yum, and every time something in apt doesn't work the way I want. Folks should just enjoy the metadata refresh time as a reason to get coffee, and blame PackageKit for your silly yum locks. (ALWAYS. REMOVE. PACKAGEKIT.) And I agree on keeping the name, and it doesn't clash with "disjunctive normal form" that way too :) .. not that I remember what that is so much.
- jdoss 11y ago
  Thank you for not giving up on Ansible at the start. It's great stuff and it enables people to do some pretty cool things.

DAddYE 12y ago

I never had a chance to interact with him but I share the same feeling. I'm probably too an old fool but I really liked YUM.

SwellJoe 12y ago
I suspect he would have been right out front on integrating these new ideas into yum; he had a long history of pushing yum forward (which is why it became the standard for RHEL and Fedora despite Red Hat having developed one of their own; but, it was clear to everyone, including Red Hat, that up2date was inferior in every way to yum). So, I tend to think if he were still around, we wouldn't be talking about something replacing yum, we would instead be talking about new features in yum. I think it is unfortunate that people felt the need to fork rather than enhance.

hyperrail 12y ago

> Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud. Indeed, to me, saying "dnf" out loud suggests "did not finish," which is the opposite of what you want from a package repository tool!

bgilroy26 12y ago
Did not find [package]!
Natsu 12y ago
Well, they eventually did finish Duke Nukem: Forever, right?
- Retra 12y ago
  Well, they released it anyway. :P

pjbrunet 12y ago

Be careful out there... http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/thank-you-seth-vidal http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/thank-you-seth-vidal http://www.wral.com/man-charged-in-durham-hit-and-run-that-killed-bicyclist/12644209/ http://www.wral.com/man-charged-in-durham-hit-and-run-that-k...

mpdehaan2 12y ago

Ditto. I mess Seth a great amount and this too makes me sad a bit -- though his code and advice lives on in scores of people. His belief in Ansible being a decent idea really kept me going with it after the first 2 months or so, otherwise I might not have continued it as a side project, and over the course of several years, he helped me a ton with various issues and was an amazing sounding board, including sharing a lot of advice when I as being plagued by nuisance CVE reports and wondering what to do about them. We had occasional arguments and he was usually right, and we always resolved things. (We had also previously worked on Func together with Adrian Likins, who wrote most of up2date, which was also a great experience - Seth knocked out most of the fun SSL parts). Back then used to meet around Duke to come up with crazy patent ideas to supplement our low Red Hat salaries (mine was anyway), and ... yeah, so much fun. At his service, what was super amazing was pretty much everyone said the same thing about how he had helped them, dozens upon dozens of people, and it was really one of the most moving things I've ever seen. One of the few that made you come out saying "whoa" and wanting to be a better person and care about helping other people more than I did. And I think I did. Or I'm trying hard to. Seth got a lot of hell for yum and shared many of my frustrations with the nature of the OSS community at times, but I still prefer it than a lot of idioms in apt. Things like yumdownloader, createrepo, --enablerepo, --disablerepo, and many things like it, just made it click for me, and it worked so well. And working with people like him at Red Hat made it really feel special to be there and to be able to learn from them. I think about him every time I run yum, and every time something in apt doesn't work the way I want. Folks should just enjoy the metadata refresh time as a reason to get coffee, and blame PackageKit for your silly yum locks. (ALWAYS. REMOVE. PACKAGEKIT.) And I agree on keeping the name, and it doesn't clash with "disjunctive normal form" that way too :) .. not that I remember what that is so much.

jdoss 11y ago
Thank you for not giving up on Ansible at the start. It's great stuff and it enables people to do some pretty cool things.