F7 odd yum repository problem and fix

[viiia]

This is more of a solution post than a question, since I stumbled upon the answer after googling for hours (I didn't see this posted anywhere before) and staring and yum files. This problem is specific to Fedora 7 (it should be obvious in a minute why), and I might have been the only person in the world with this problem...

Initially I wanted to run pup (the Fedora software updater) but it would complain with a very misleading and otherwise uninformative message:

Unable to retrieve software information. This could be caused by not having a network connection available. Details: None.

I decided to run yum on the command line instead, and I got a slightly more informative message:

[root@pu110769 yum.repos.d]# yum update
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Update Process
Error: Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: updates

I tried a million things, but what fixed it was simply editing /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo, changing the two lines of the form

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-fc$releasever&arch=$basearch

into

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch

the only difference being the removal of the letter C from fc (since the OS is now Fedora, not Fedora Core). Only this file exhibited this odd behavior, and I think the reason it wasn't properly modified during the Fedora 7 installation (I assume it should have) might have to do with a very problematic installation in which Anaconda kept running out of memory and crashed often (but that's a different problem, don't ask me about it here).

I also had a similar problem with pidgin:

[root@pu110769 yum.repos.d]# yum update
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Update Process
Error: Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository: pidgin

I'm not sure what the problem was in this case (maybe one of you can tell me), but in this case I used the workaround and set the line enabled to "enabled=0" in /etc/yum.repos.d/pidgin.repo . Now yum and pup are happy again! And I get updates! Hopefully this is helpful for somebody.