On Mon, 2012-01-23 at 10:38 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
EPEL's policy is to not replace any upstream packages so there is generally no versioning issue if they are the only additional repo
There is much more than just that to it, read inconsistent package naming, "public" libraries residing together with the application in the same package and the list goes on.
On top of this there are things like packages compiled against libraries with different ABI versions etc., which very quickly gets messy once your package base becomes sufficiently large and you are mixing sources.
All of this can only be fully resolved by a substantial effort to keep repositories compatible, which in turn requires the resources that neither RF or EPEL have to spare.
There have been some efforts to keep the repositories "reasonably" compatible from both sides, but that's pretty much as far as you can get given current situation; it will never be perfect.