[CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag

Lanny Marcus lmmailinglists at gmail.com
Tue Jun 30 01:50:31 UTC 2009


On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 10:20 AM, Radu-Cristian
FOTESCU<beranger5ca at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>> A quick look at http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=centos
>> shows that a great majority of the packages are not even
>> close to being "up-to-date", and that is a good thing for
>> those us of who care more about stability than eyecandy.
>
> That can't be other way. For instance, you can't build GIMP 2.4 or 2.6
> unless you you upgrade to a newer GTK+, which would impact on a lot of
> apps.
>
> OTOH, Dag is in a funny position: he's the main maintainer of RPMforge,
> which has 2 main issues:
> (1) It's broken, at least partially. Try install audacious for one.
> (2) It's incompatible with EPEL. Try install MPlayer and VLC with EPEL
> enabled.
>
> To workaround some of the issues and make CentOS 5.3 a suitable distro
> for my Acer laptop (except that I don't use wireless and I haven't
> even tried to), I've made my own repo here:
>    http://odiecolon.lastdot.org/
>
> Read the first-page text and rationale *very* carefully!
>
> It's therefore an ugly hack to allow:
> *** the use of the following packages from RPMforge:
> (1) gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg
> (2) mplayer mplayer-fonts mplayer-skins mplayerplug-in smplayer
> (3) vlc
> *** the regular use of EPEL for everything else;
> *** the use of newer packages, such as GIMP 2.3.15 as an "almost-2.4"
> alternative to the obsolete 2.2.12;
> *** the use of other (unavailable in EPEL or newer) packages, including
> "cosmetic mood enhancers":

I have been using RPMforge much longer than EPEL and only have a few
packages from EPEL on my 5.3 (32 bit) desktop. When I added the EPEL
Repository to Priorities, the number of packages excluded went from
approximately 400 to 1705. My belief is that had I not given EPEL a
very low priority, it would have replaced approximately 1300 packages.
Probably those whose priority is to have the latest and greatest
should be using another distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). The philosophy
behind Enterprise Distros is stability and security and long life, not
having the latest and greatest packages.



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