Yum has certainly improved lately, both in speed and memory footprint, so I've switched back from apt in the hope that yum will be good enough for my needs this time. And so far it seems to be working very well. There are two things I badly miss from apt though. The "source" and "build-dep" commands. For those not familiar with them, "source" is the same as "install" but for "src" packages. It also works as a normal user though. "build-dep" installs all the BuildRequires of the named package. When you do a lot of small fixes here and there for different packages, these tools are invaluable. So I'd be a very happy camper if yum got these.
yumdownloader and yum-builddep in yum-utils already do this.
It's worth pointing out that yumdownloader only does the download part of the "apt-get source" UI. You then have to explode it, I have an rpmsrc alias: rpmsrc='rpm -Uvh --define "_sourcedir `pwd`" --define "_specdir `pwd`"' ...that helps, but really it's just better to look at the Fedora repo directly and use "cvs co <package>" and make prep. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/documentation-guide/en_US/sn-cvs-config.html#sn-cvs-config-anon
(In reply to comment #1) > yumdownloader and yum-builddep in yum-utils already do this. Ah, didn't know about those. Still, these would be a lot more convenient in the main yum program. (In reply to comment #2) > It's worth pointing out that yumdownloader only does the download part of the > "apt-get source" UI. You then have to explode it, I have an rpmsrc alias: > A bit of a letdown, but at least I don't have do dig up a URL manually. (One can also just use rpm -U once you have a correctly configured .rpmmacros) > > ...that helps, but really it's just better to look at the Fedora repo directly > and use "cvs co <package>" and make prep. > Assuming that fedora's repos are the only ones you need. ;)