Hi, (proposed) short version: in the future (not including SLE11-SP2) repo services will be cached, so if you expect a service to change (SP migration?), call "zypper refs". Discussion, please comment (Wagon, SUSE Manager, hello): As you know, zypp takes packages from *repositories*, and the package/repo metadata is cached: without autorefresh, the cache is refreshed only explicitly by zypper refresh (ref). With autorefresh (and unless overriden by --no-refresh) , we contact the server to update one or more metadata files BUT only if some time has elapsed since we last contacted the server (5 minutes by default). Zypp also knows *services*, which essentially are server-defined mutable lists of repositories. They too have an autorefresh attribute and respect --no-refresh. However, they do not have the timed cache like above. For interactive usage it is only a minor annoyance since you usually have only one service (nu.novell.com) so there is only one round trip. But as soon as you use Chef which checks many packages individualy with a "zypper info" call, the latencies add up. Therefore I've proposed to add a service cache. Michael has pointed out that some use cases rely on the service not being cached, namely the migration to a next service pack, which we implement by installing a product and relying on nu.novell.com to give us a new set of repos. With the service cache, those use cases would need an explicit service cache invalidation AKA zypper service-refresh (refs). I think that should be done in the long term, and in the short term (SLE11 SP2) the service cache would be disabled by default. Regarding how to control the service cache: a) zypp.conf has an option repo.refresh.delay, so we could add service.refresh.delay b) a CLI option '--allow-service-cache <sec>' I prefer (a) for symmetry and it seems that (b) per-run config is not needed, otherwise users would request --allow-repo-cache already. -- Martin Vidner, YaST developer http://en.opensuse.org/User:Mvidner Kuracke oddeleni v restauraci je jako fekalni oddeleni v bazenu