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

[Stephen Harris]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 10:34:17PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Stephen Harris wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> I could have sworn that when I had yum working right with the jpackage 
> repos I was able to:
> yum install tomcat4
> yum install tomcat5
> yum install tomcat55

That's barely touching the surface of this complicated mess.  What if
I want tomcat4.0.1 and tomcat4.0.2?   perl5.8.0 and perl5.8.1 and
perl5.8.2 ?  If these all go into their own directory trees then the
user will _never_ know where to find perl ("/usr/bin/perl" would be a
conflict that needs managing).

Now what happens if Fred creates a tin1.8.2 and John creates a tin1.8.2
but with different compile options?  If we can't even get all the
repostories to use a simple repotag, we'd never get them to compile with
non-standard paths!

-- 

rgds
Stephen