When one uses up2date with yum channels for a while up2dates yum header cache keeps growing. I understand that up2date needs headers for ALL packages, my grudge with up2date is that it keeps headers from older packages, here is a part of an ls on my system in /var/spool/up2date: XFree86-ISO8859-14-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-14-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-14-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-14-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-14-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-14-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-42.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-50.i386.hdr XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-4.3.0-55.i386.hdr Notice how all the .hdr are there 3 times ! A second problem is that XFree86 is obsolete and thus the hdr's shouldn't be there anymore at all! My suggestion: Remove .hdr if: a) there is a newer version (and thus hdr) of the same package and the old version is not installed (to keep kernel hdr's wenn multiple kernel versions are installed) b) the package is no longer in any repository and it is not installed (remove hdr's when removing packages due to obsoletes)
yum has an even worse problem. The yum.cron script never runs yum clean so old packages even stay on the server which eventually fills up /var and stops other apps that depend on var from working. I am going to file this as a seperate bug for yum.
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
I've tried to reproduce this with FC4 test and up2date now properly cleans up after itself, closing.