Description of problem: when yum is executed by regular user, yum downloads metadata even if the "root" metadata are up-to-date. [root@server ~]# rpm -q yum yum-3.2.22-40.el5 [root@server ~]# yum list bash Loaded plugins: product-id, security, subscription-manager This system is not registered to Red Hat Subscription Management. You can use subscription-manager to register. Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Installed Packages bash.i386 3.2-32.el5 installed [root@server ~]# su - karel [karel@server ~]$ yum list bash Loaded plugins: product-id, security, subscription-manager beaker-client 28/28 beaker-harness 35/35 qa-tools 193/193 rhel-5 2518/2518 rhel-5-debug 1022/1022 Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Installed Packages bash.i386 3.2-32.el5 installed Probably fixed upstream with http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum.git;a=commitdiff;h=a5e26a78e485 http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum.git;a=commitdiff;h=a5e26a78e485
This is true for RHEL-6, but I'm pretty sure there's a huge difference between what is in RHEL-5 and what is upstream ... so the changes required for RHEL-5 might be much more significant.
The upstream patch fixes breakage introduced when "prerepoconf" was merged, but that's not in EL5 code, so the cause is definitely different here (probably just a small bug, because preloading of metadata from system cache IS attemted here, too). Given the low impact, I'm closing this bug.