I have a Fedora 11 virtual which I've been using for over a year. I have installed many applications using yum. I am trying to write some software that parses the output from "yum list updates" or "yum check update." I tried these commands a few days ago and they both worked, although I usually had to give the command "yum clean all" before each use to get any output. Now, no matter what I do, they persistently show no available updates.

I have not updated any of my applications, much less all hundred or so. I have not given the command "yum update" until a few minutes ago just to see if it would give some different result than what I have just described, but it too showed no packages available. I have another Fedora 11 virtual and yum shows pages of available updates there. I coped the repositories and also yum.conf from that virtual to the one that is showing no updates, but it still didn't show any. Unless the virtual has secretly updated every package without telling me, I do not understand why I am getting this result.

Fedora 11 is end of life and obsolete for a couple of years now. No further updates.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/piper...ne/002830.html

But how did it change in one day from showing pages of available updates to none?

I don't know. Perhaps it is a bug that has been fixed in the six subsequent Fedora releases?

I see your point, but it's a case where I an deliberately using an old environment so that what I create will work on both old and new systems. If a bug at all, I would think it a bug in yum, but I can't help feeling that I could figure it out if I knew more.

What kind of things are we talking about? What kind of things do you create?

I create products which my employer sells. They need to work on as many Linux distros as possible and ideally would work on both old and new distros. This is our motivation for developing in a relatively old environment.

Red Hat/Centos/Scientific Linux would be my recommendation for a development environment similar to Fedora 11 (but still actively supported), good luck!

I can understand their thinking, but it's based on a Windows model. If you're developing for Windows, you have to produce a product that will work on XP as well as 7. With a free operating system, people don't keep old versions running.

If you look at the Distrowatch page hit ranking, the top 10 includes
Ubuntu: widely used with unique desktop
CentOS: clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with older software and Gnome desktop
OpenSuse: basis of Suse Enterprise Linux, with KDE desktop
Arch: very up-to-date software
If it will run on these, it should run on anything.

I agree with David. Where do you draw the line? Fedora core 6? 1? How do you decide?

I can't say too much about it, but we don't want customers who may have older distros to tell us that our products don't work. We, therefore, try to develop and build in older environments.