[CentOS] What's wrong with yum-priorities?

[Mike A. Harris]

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Les Mikesell wrote:

>> People come to this page because they need/want/have
>> to resort to 3rd party repos. When asked in the CentOS forums, I refer
>> them to the Repositories article and I continue to advise them to use
>> the priorities plugin.
> 
> It doesn't matter how you do it.  There is still a chance that a file included 
> in a 3rd party package that you install will subsequently be included in a base 
> package update.  And then you'll have the conflict regardless of any way you try 
> to control the priorities.  An example now would be if you had installed 
> something that required libgcrypt11 from ATrpms.  Now the 
> /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11 file will conflict with an update to the stock 
> libgcrypt-1.4.4-5.el5.i386.rpm package.

This exact problem occurred with java-1.6.0-openjdk, when it was
originally part of the EPEL addon repository, but then Red Hat released
it as an official part of RHEL with the 5.3 release (IIRC).  The problem
this caused users of the EPEL package, was that the Red Hat openjdk was
an _older_ version of the package, and did not come with the web browser
plugin.  The EPEL repository withdrew their package so as not to
conflict with the Red Hat packages.  As a result, people whom found the
EPEL openjdk browser plugin worked fine for what they need now lost
their plugin leaving the following choices:

1) Use the Red Hat openjdk and not have a browser plugin.

2) Install Sun or IBM Java instead.

3) Remove the official Red Hat openjdk, get a copy of the original EPEL
openjdk and rebuild it for yourself, and use that.


I've used multiple repositories on various OS releases for a while now,
and you do need to use some creative yum configuration to try and keep a
clean system when doing so, but unfortunately no configuration is likely
to ever completely prevent all possible cross-repository problems that
could occur.  ;o/

The best we can hope for, is that in future releases, the primary
official repository continues to get larger and larger, and that any 3rd
party repositories work more closely together to resolve potential
conflicts and other issues.


- --
Mike A. Harris                   Website: http://mharris.ca
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https://identi.ca/mharris | https://twitter.com/mikeaharris
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