@zaphod42 Lots of problematic cases - mostly revolving around the fact that people are expecting the cache to be primed and won't be prepared for the sudden dump.

The expectation is that the the yum ecosystem will behave as expected, particularly w/r/t caching. Clearing cache through setting a retries option would be an unexpected side effect with potential performance impact - significant impact if it's done repeatedly across many machines. My expectation as a user is that "retries" means "retries" - likely because the repo server was unavailable - and not "retry + clear cache."

It also attaches very different behavior to different tools, as the notion of retry + clear cache is going to mean even more divergent things in an apt universe vs an rpm universe.