[CentOS] how to push the bounds and get newer packages for centos 5.4?

[Les Mikesell]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   i've just started looking after a (virtual) centos 5.4 server that's
> hosted at rackspace and, unsurprisingly, it was set up with all the
> standard defaults.  part of the work i'll be doing involves php and,
> as i read it, the standard php version with centos 5.4 is php-5.1.
> 
>   if i *wanted* to move up to a more recent version (say, php-5.3),
> obviously, i'd need to go outside the limits of the standard centos
> yum repos.  in my travels, i ran across this site:
> 
> http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en
> 
> with the corresponding instructions:
> 
> wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
> wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
> rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm
> 
>   i'm suitably leery of 3rd-party repos but i recall that someone else
> (on this list?) recommended that site.  and i can see that it has an
> x86_64 version of php-5.3 ready to go for centos 5.4:
> 
> http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/5/remi/x86_64/repoview/php.html
> 
>   what are the recommendations for well-respected 3rd-party repos for
> centos 5.4 if i want to get newer packages?  the centos 5.4 system in
> question is purely an internal development system so i have the
> freedom to customize it to some extent if newer packages are called
> for.  thanks.

I use epel (has a lot of different stuff but generally does not have newer 
versions of standard packages), rpmforge (sometimes has newer stuff and may 
cause some conflicts) remi (up to date ocsinventory-server, php, mysql), and 
opennms (Sun JVM 1.5 and opennms).  Normally I leave epel enabled in the yum 
configuration and disable the others.  Then I can
yum --enablerepo=xxx install somepackage
and normally not pick up conflicting dependencies, and do the same for updates 
after doing a full update from the base and epel repos.  It is probably still 
possible to break something this way but it seems safer than trying to make yum 
guess where to get things.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com