hi

i want to update yum but is it a good idea to use yum for updating itself?
I'm a beginner and i need some advice about that

I'm also looking about a command that gives me all the available packages in a repository that i added to yum

thx

You can use yum to update itself - that's absolutely fine.

By default 'yum list' shows you all the packages from all the enabled repositories, but you can disable a repository for a single operation with "--disablerepo=repository"

So this command shows all the available packages that *aren't* from Core, Updates or Extras:

su -c 'yum --disablerepo=base --disablerepo=updates-released --disablerepo=extras list'

Most repositories have hundreds or thousands of packages so add a grep on the end to only show what you're interested in:

su -c 'yum --disablerepo=base --disablerepo=updates-released --disablerepo=extras list' | grep -i 'what-i-want'

Yum has other search facilities, which are briefly covered in the Fedora documentation:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/

I tend to go to the Website of the repository when I want to just casually browse the packages.

If you run "yum update" or "yum upgrade" without any other parameters all packages on your system including yum will be upgraded so there really is no need to upgrade yum on its own unless you are upgrading Fedora or CentOS versions.

thanks a lot