Bug 554986

Summary:	there is no need for yum lock when pirut is idle
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Petr Sklenar <psklenar>
Component:	pirut	Assignee:	James Antill <james.antill>
Status:	CLOSED CANTFIX	QA Contact:	Red Hat Satellite QA List <satqe-list>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	5.4	CC:	bkearney, lockhart
Target Milestone:	rc	Keywords:	Reopened
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2010-01-13 21:49:26 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Petr Sklenar 2010-01-13 10:46:56 UTC

Description of problem:
Let pirut only running and doing nothing , it holds yum lock - its not needed.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
pirut-1.3.28-17.el5

How reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. start pirut
2. use yum; yum repolist
  
Actual results:
[root@dhcp-28-219 ~]# pirut &
[1] 10277 &
[root@dhcp-28-219 ~]# yum repolist
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
Existing lock /var/run/yum.pid: another copy is running as pid 10277.

Expected results:
when pirut is idle and doing no updates there is no need to hold lock. 

Additional info:

Comment 1 James Antill 2010-01-13 14:29:27 UTC

 Yeh, it is needed ... it's basically a running version of yum, with a GUI, kind of like if you started yum shell, and left it open.
 So if any of the yum data changes under it, bad things will happen.

Comment 2 John W. Lockhart 2010-01-13 17:28:43 UTC

So why shouldn't the lock time out (perhaps configurably), and a refresh happen when activity resumes?  (Somewhat like a web session timing out due to inactivity.)

We've already seen this behavior interfere with other use of yum.  Not only does the pirut user lose data when the process is tracked down and killed, but others get to figure out what's holding the lock and then kill it off...

Are any other system-wide services blockable so quietly and easily?  Is it obvious to users that leaving pirut idle will inconvenience all other potential users of yum?  

The behavior might be okay on a single-user system, but should be re-thought for multi-user/multi-admin systems.  

Please re-consider the 'CantFix'.

Comment 4 James Antill 2010-01-13 21:51:32 UTC

If you are really worried about it, feel free to open an RFE against pirut to work out when it's been "idle" for too long and then auto shutdown. That's probably not trivial (esp. given the lack of outside testing we get on it now), but might be doable.