Bug 119662

Description of problem:
With many of the changes in recent versions of up2date, its becoming
more useful as a generic package installation tool. Unlike rpm, it
allows customers to resolve dependencies from the network, query
dependencies for custom and third party apps, resolve dependencies
from local and remote repositories, and more. As I'm sure you know.
I'm an RHCX and have a lot of customer contact: they all *really* like
the tool.

One thing that's stopping up2date becoming Really Useful is that it
insists on refreshing indexes every time its run. I can understand the
need to make sure clients aren't using old index files when they
update their systems, especially for security updates, but when you're
performing a whole bunch of operations using up2date, you don't want
to refresh the list of available packages each time you ran the
command (this is particularly noticable in countries without local RHN
mirrors where this operation can take a very long time).

A possible solution could lie in the following:
* The addition of a 'refresh' argument to up2date to get information
on new packages.
* Using the RHNSd application - which, from what I've read, polls RHN
  every two hours - to force up2date to refresh when it is next run.

But you might have a better idea.

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Use up2date to install a package
2.Use up2date to install another package
  
Actual results:
The indexes are downloaded twice, though it might have only been
seconds since they were last downloaded. This makes up2date slow and
puts unecessary load on the repository servers.

Expected results:
A way to refresh indexes on an as-needed basis.