Hello everybody.

I checked yum-cron documentation, config files and source but still fail
to understand the purpose of executing yum-cron every hour in default
configuration in SL 7.0.

It doesn't install updates or mails you about pending ones, it doesn't
seem to to anything remotely useful at all (unlike yum-cron daily which
installs updates - of type configured in config file - and sends you
email if it did install anything).

On the other hand, yum-cron-hourly is a major annoyance factor. Like
half dozen of times when I wanted to install something on various SL7
systems I got message that yum is waiting for yum-cron to finish and
release lock. yum-cron gets stuck on slow mirrors very often and
regularly manages to do it at the same exact moment when I want to
install some package. And unlike regular yum, you can't exactly press
Ctrl-C for it to switch to another mirror, it just gets stuck for tens
of minutes and prevents you from using yum yourself, unless you're to
kill it on the spot.

And since it defies normal metadata expiring logic by making it expire
every hour on its run, it *does* load extra metadata over and over and
has high chance of getting stuck because it does so every hour.

I can switch it off, but it still bothers me that I don't understand
its purpose. It's not like daily yum-cron needs it. And if I wanted to
do "yum makecache" every hour I'd do so myself from cron. In fact, it
would be more useful since it loads all the extra metadata like for
"groupinfo/groupinstall", display changelog plugin and such.

-- 

Vladimir