yum_updates fact: too slow

[otheus]

The yum_updates and yum_has_updates facts are too slow. On a reasonably fast system, 4 to 6s are needed to resolve this fact. Just because we want a yum module to manage packages and repositories, we don't want to drag in a pointless fact when it incurs such a (relatively) high time- and resource cost.

Thus, this shouldn't be a fact unless it can be done with little cost.

However, I'm against deprecating existing features when security is not the primary issue.

Instead, the algorithm can be improved by caching the result.

[otheus]

It's underdocumented, and not well implemented, but these can be cached by puppet 3.14.10 and higher by modifying $PUPPET_CONFIG_DIR/facter/facter.conf:

facts : {
  ttls : [
    { "cached-custom-facts" : 1 day },
  ]
}
fact-groups :  {
 cached-custom-facts : [
    "yum_has_updates", "yum_updates", "yum_package_updates",
 ]
}

I also recommend package_provider, rsyslog_version since these are relatively slow as well.