Article Organization

This section tells you how to avoid reading much of this article if you are in a hurry by describing its organization in more depth than that permitted by a table of contents. Readers of this article are likely to split into three general groups:

Users (of the Yum Client only): You have just installed a system that has yum preinstalled or want to yum-maintain a system already installed from some RPM based distribution. You may want to read the section on ``What Yum Can Do'' (a review of its principal features and advantages) and ``Getting and Installing Yum'' and then skip ahead to the section on ``The Yum Client''.

Systems Administrators: You are interested in setting up one or more RPM repositories and using yum to maintain a LAN of systems installed and maintained from these repositories (possibly augmented in various ways by public repositories that support yum). You are the primary audience for whom this article is intended, and will need to read all the sections.

Potential Yum Developers: You are in either of the two categories above but have or wish to develop python skills and are excited at the prospect of helping to create a that could one day make Linux ``transparent'' across all distributions and packaging schema. You too will need to read the entire article - for starters - and then of course go on and read all the documentation you can get your hands on, including the source.

Everybody can read or skip the Conclusion as they like - it contains a measure of future prognostication but little functional information essential to the use of yum in its current revision.