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

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Sat Jul 28 12:56:08 UTC 2007


On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, JC Júnior wrote:

> I received a message about EPEL repository, I would like to know if this repo
> is long term support too.

Let me add that an effort to make sure EPEL is compatible with RPMforge 
failed as EPEL wants to become the only repository for RHEL and there is 
no interest to consider current RPMforge users.

EPEL refused the repotag, so one cannot easily identify where a package 
comes from and mixing repositories becomes harder. Since compatibility is 
a 2 way interaction and EPEL shows no interest, it is certain that mixing 
EPEL with other repositories may break something.

Also EPEL's Fedora legacy makes EPEL closer to Fedora's Extras packages 
than they are with RPMforge's packages, which can lead to problems with 
eg. nagios-plugins or clamav packages.

I already foresee a lot of frustration caused by bug-reports that make it 
not clear that packages come from EPEL (much like in the Fedora era where 
Fedora Extras packages caused problems with RPMforge that were hard to 
identify or fix).

Also, EPEL packages only exist for RHEL4 and RHEL5, resp 340 and 600 
projects while RPMforge builds for RHEL2, RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5, 
about 3400 projects. We however do not provide any PPC packages.

As always, be careful what you enable and cherry pick rather than enable 
fully.

PS Within a corporate environment, look at the mrepo tool for managing 
repositories and cherry picking packages for deploying and managing 
systems. Do not enable repositories company wide !

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]


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