Hi Troy,

I'm with Martin on this one: While I do understand why you want to have 
a working default configuration and a working update mechanism installed 
by default, it shouldn't be a hassle to opt out for sites with many 
systems, their own mirror, and/or their own way to apply updates.

If I got it right, all I have to do in order to opt out is to provide an 
RPM which provides one or more of yum-{conf,autoupdate,kernelmodule}?

Fine. Anyone who doesn't want those should really be able to do this.

On the choice of yum releases: As long as it works and there are no 
changes to invocation or configuration (preferrably not even upon minor 
updates), whatever you consider the best one certainly is. If there are 
incompatibilities with previous releases, there should be a significant 
benefit due to an upgrade and it shouldn't happen in between minor 
releases.

Examples of what I would consider a  "significant benefit" :

  - performance improvement > 25%
  - additional, much wanted functionality (smarter resolver, ...)
  - true reduction of workload on developers/maintainers

Cheers,
	Stephan

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
  DESY - DV -
  Platanenallee 6
  15738 Zeuthen, Germany