One of the few things that keeps me running while I am only on dialup is 'yum localupdate'. With a combination of 'yum check-update' and 'yum localupdate' I can get a list of what RPMs I need to update, pull down copies of those RPMs at work, dump them onto a USB key, take them home, and then update them locally.

In theory.

In practice, 'yum localupdate' seems to sometimes ignore RPMs that I've supplied on the command line if they're merely things that need to be installed for dependencies. Then, of course, it insists on downloading them again, over my slow PPP link, which causes me to use rude language, hit ^C and ^\ a lot, and (this time) finally end up using kill -9 on yum to get it to stop (insert rant here).

Part of the problem is that yum localupdate doesn't really give any clear picture of what it's going to do, since it is hijacking status displays not intended to draw a distinction between stuff that will be downloaded and stuff that doesn't need to be; this means that things like the 'amount to be downloaded' line have no useful information.

(Perhaps this is a sign that I should just use 'rpm -U', since I suppose it's not as if yum is doing anything for me in this situation; I already should have the full set of dependencies.)