[HanoiLUG] alternatives to yum?

[Steve]

Does anyone know of an alternative to yum for package management on
rpm-based distros?  A little quick Googling turns up nothing.  I still
need to work with rpms, but I'm rapidly reaching the point where doing
dependency resolution and such by hand is preferable to dealing with the
vagaries of the package manager.

My particular recent problems:
 - yum will update its repo metadata whenever it is run, which makes
things painfully slow.  If you tell it not to update said metadata, it
won't download package headers to find deps, either.
 - yum will use cached repo metadata whenever the repo has actually
been updated.  The only way to force it to do this is to clear all the
caches first.
 - yum won't tell you what version of a package you're updating from,
just the new version it wants to install.
 - yum will sometimes just hang.  When this happens, a reboot is
required to get it back into a working state.  (I've tried the usual
killing of stale processes and cleaning up lockfiles, etc. -- they don't
work.)
 - yum puts a global lock on itself, so you can't search for new
packages while it's updating or installing anything, or even while it's
searching for something else.
 - yum is a festering pile of dung that consumes a disproportionate
amount of my time and energy.

If a suitable alternative does not exist. I was thinking of forking
yum and hacking
it into something with more useful semantics.  For starters, separate
update/upgrade steps and better version information.