What makes the repository information so bulky? When I want to run a package manager over a slow link it can take 30 minutes to download this 8 megabyte file of just the security updates. I had to do that the other day to install a plain 100k-ish ftp client. I would assume that the package manager would simply need a list of current packages and their version numbers to compare them with the local versions, but I guess there is more to it than that. tried unzipping one of those files that ends in bz2 in the /var/cache/yum... to see what was so special about them, but get stonewalled by bzip & tar, "tar: This does not look like a tar archive", "bzip2: Compressed file ends unexpectedly"
Guess I'll never know.