[CentOS] Re: Mixing RPMforge and EPEL (Was: EPEL repo)

[Stephen Harris]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 04:02:08PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Question: how many levels of symlinks-pointing-to-symlinks does it take 
> to get to the right place?  And having supplied this number of symlinks, 
> how can a user choose to execute one version of java while someone else 
> prefers the other?  Or how do you run one application under one version 
> and another with a different one?

The question you have asked is a _complicated_ one.  Many businesses
have come up with home grown solutions to this problem (in my place it's
called DAM; Dynamic Application Management; default values are determined
by individual/group/server/NIS).  It works on Solaris, HPUX, AIX and Linux.

However, it's _definitely_ beyond the scope of an OS package management
system such as yum and rpm.

Anyone who wants to run more than one version of a specific piece of
software is a "power user" (whether they recognise it or not) and the
standard pre-built RPMs found in the repositories are _not_ designed
for them.  Such a user should build their own versions or use a repository
designed for multi-versioning.

You have to recognise the limited problem that the repositories were meant
to solve.  They're not meant to be the ultimate answer to everyone's problems;
they're meant to be a simple collection of software then typical end user
can make use of.  repotags would help avoid conflicts between repositories.

They are _not_ meant to solve the multi-versioning issue.

Kludges such as "alternatives" is a true kludge requiring the rpm packages to
support it (ie a build time issue) and is not a solution to handling multiple
repos nor multiple versions as a generic solution.

-- 

rgds
Stephen