I’m still banging on hosting my first yum repository, so I’m by no means as knowledgeable with how it stores metadata, etc as I am with apt-get.  But, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t get yum to recognize my packages right after adding them to the repository. 

It turns out that yum caches metadata for some time period, an hour or so, which is abysmally long when you’re creating packages left and right.  So, I tried sudo yum clean metadata which gave me an error that my repositry was listed more than once.  It wasn’t.  I checked.  Many times.

It turns out Redhat Enterprise has a but in 5.2 that double lists it in the cached data.  Great.  Read about it here.   Thankfully I did learn that yum clean all --noplugins seems to clear it up pretty well.  I’m not sure what other data it clears though, but so far it’s doing what I want.