What is the meaning of status column in the yum repolist output on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6?

Resolution

• Looking in the source code we can observe:

  yumcommands.py
  ---------------------------------------
  class RepoListCommand(YumCommand):
      def getNames(self):
          return ('repolist',)
  
    {... SNIP ...}
                  # We don't show status for list disabled
                   if arg != 'disabled' or verbose:
                       if verbose or base.conf.exclude or repo.exclude:
                           num        = len(repo.sack.simplePkgList())
                       else:
                           num        = len(repo.sack)
                       ui_num     = _num2ui_num(num)
                       excludes   = repo.sack._excludes
                       excludes   = len([pid for r,pid in excludes if r == repo])
                       if excludes:
                           ui_excludes_num = _num2ui_num(excludes)    
                           if not verbose:
                               ui_num += "+%s" % ui_excludes_num <--- shows the number of excluded packages
                       tot_num   += num
  

• Going further and looking at yum's man page:

  ".... 
    In  non-verbose  mode the first column will start with a '*' if the repo. has metalink data and the latest metadata is not local. For non-verbose mode
  the last column will also display the number of packages in the repo. and (if there are any user specified excludes) the number of packages excluded.
    .... "
  

• The status column shows the number of packages available in repository. In the below example (5,098+2) means that there are 5100 packages in the repository out of which Number of packages can be install(5098) + packages excluded(2):

        # yum repolist 
        Loaded plugins: priorities, rhnplugin
        repo id                                 repo name                                                       status
        rhel-x86_64-server-6                    Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 6 for 64-bit x86_64)         5,098+2 
  

• To check which packages have been excluded from installation please check /etc/yum.conf file.