YUM metadata parser written in C. * Why? The biggest complaint people have with YUM is often the performance of parsing the metadata. This implementation should be ~10 times faster, parsing the primary.xml file under 1 second usually, filelists.xml under 3 seconds and other.xml under 4 seconds. It uses a lot less memory as well, some testings I have done show it uses ~4mb instead of 40mb standard YUM uses. * How? Should be really easy: python setup.py build sudo python setup.py install --prefix=/usr (Assuming you python prefix is /usr). The next time you use yum, it regenerates the sqlitecache because the database schema is slightly different.