[CentOS] obtaining non-packaged software

[Mathieu Baudier]

>> RPMForge has a lot of packages (but be careful!).  rpmbone has more.
>
> Careful about what?

Third-party repos sometimes conflict.
For example if you activate both EPEL and RPMForge fully, it is very
likely that your perl-* packages will be a complete mess.

That's why I personally followed the approach of enabling EPEL
(almost) fully and then include RPMForge packages one by one (see my
previous mail)

It could be done the other way around, using primarily RPMForge and
then picking up EPEL packages one by one.
RPMForge is "stronger" on multimedia, up-to-date versions etc., but
EPEL is a Fedora project and many packages have the same maintainer in
EPEL and Fedora. So, by using it you stay more in the "Red Hat
family", since RHEL (and thus CentOS) releases are based on Fedora.

A recommended approach is also to use the yum priorities plugin:
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities