Last night chris jones notified me the Oracle public yum server is available.
The default page of the website (http://public-yum.oracle.com/) contains information about how to setup OEL4, OEL5 and Oracle VM 2 to use it, both the i386 and the x86_64 version.
As I’ve guessed in my previous post, the yum server does not contain an update channel, it just contains the contents of the installation media.
With this announcement, Chris Jones of Oracle reports Oracle is providing an Oracle Enterprise Linux yum server.
This will enable oracle enterprise linux servers with internet access to use yum for package management. This is especially handy for beginning linux administrators, because yum handles some of the package dependency issues of RPM, sometimes called ‘RPM hell’. (although “real” RPM hell only occures when you start mixing RPM repositories, which can make dependency matching impossible, because of version discrepancies between the repositories).
Of course it’s also handy for non-beginners, with the ability to install RPM packages with a simple yum command, or find packages which contain a certain library.
Oracle also provides an up2date service for the updates. My guess is the yum repository will provide the packages which are also on the (free) downloadable CD’s or DVD, and updates (because of bugs or security alerts) are still delivered with up2date. But again, that’s just a guess.