On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 00:05 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
When an rpm is built for CentOS-Extras or CentOS-Plus, is it safe to assume that people using these repo's only use them for specific rpms ( eg, someone with a stock CentOS install might use the CentOS-Plus repo for php-5 and only php-5 ) or are most people enabling the entire repo ?
This question comes from the idea of when building a package, should a rpm, hosted in CentOS-Plus link against only [base]+[updates] and only use the minimum possible set of packages from [centosplus] ? So as to have a situation wherein you can use selective packages from CentOS-Plus, while not needing any support stuff from there ( eg. postfix-mysql in CentOS-Plus should link against mysql-4.1 since thats whats in [base] rather than mysql-5 which is in CentOS Plus )
This does create a risk that we might end up creating packages that are themselves incompatible with other packages from the same repository, but work fine when used with the [base] packages for the same functionality.
The other option is to have the entire CentOS-Plus repo enabled for any packages built for the same repo, which might mean that using php-5 from CentOS-Plus needs MySQL-5 and pgsql-8 from CentOS Plus also installed.
Comments ?
Well, it is currently done so that each major grouping of packages goes with "base + updates"
By grouping, I mean that some things (php and php-pear as an example) can require each other as a group ... no need to try and make any of them compatible with another version.
That is how I think we should maintain it, to that maximum extent possible ...
We are also making sure (to the max extent possible) that Items that are in there also work with backward compatibility (ie, the mysql5 will also work with packages are in base and compiled against mysql4).
We have things in CentOSPlus that we don't want people to use UNLESS they need it (the mysql_pgsql postfix is an example) ... so I think that the packages need to be stand alone and work with "base + updates" individually.
Now, I also understand that SOME packages may need to be done so that they are built against the versions in centosplus ... and if that is the case, then we need to specify the minimum install requirements in the program to make that happen and make sure that is spelled out in readme files and/or the wiki.
I personally use parts of CentOSPlus (mysql5,php5) and not other parts (no postfix_mysql_pgsql, no kernel / xfs / reiserfs etc.)
I do not think that it should be required that if you use mysql5 or php5 from centosplus that you also have to use pgsql8 from there ... or if you use the kernel, we should expect that you should also use mysql or php.
I think we need to keep it the way that it currently is and that centosplus items are separate to the max extent practical.