On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 06:44:08AM -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion ... mine is that the yum from CentOS is a critical package and should not be replaced with out a very, very good reason. Yours is different. Neither is right or wrong ... they are just different approaches.
Sure, and ATrpms' policy wrt to RHEL is to move replacing packages into the testing repo until a better solution is found. Only that yum is not part of RHEL4 end even worse, different clones of RHEL use different yum versions and different sets of (sometimes home-made) plugins. E.g. when talking about "replacing base packages" in RHEL & clone worlds it becomes quite obfuscated.
The yum in ATrpms is there for two reasons:
o making sure RHEL users also have a yum, but more important o several yum bugs that are triggered by some ATrpms packages have been fixed in later yum version w/o a backport. ATM some plugins and repo policies had unconvered yet another pile of yum bugs that were fixed with 3.2.8 and affected many ATrpms packages (the infamous: "Your installed kernel is not installed" installonly bug).
So wrt to yum and a couple similar infratsructure packages it would be nice to have a canonical clone (e.g. from my POV a merged CentOS/SL universe, something I've been advocating) to define as base and then either invest in backporting bugfixes (which is difficult given that yum is at a fast pace and the authors almost never do backports), or update yum more often to remove these bugs (which involves testing yum on CentOS3-5).
But this gets off the centos-user list charter a bit, I do hope that working together on the merged 3rd party repo will have side-effects like bringing CentOS/SL even closer and at the end not even have to worry about 3rd party repos. Maybe we should move part of this discussions to other lists. As a short term fix we could discuss on centos/sl-devel whether a new common yum infrastructure could be shared by centos/sl and atrpms (and maybe other 3rd party repos, I think maybe Dag or Dries may have yum shipping, too) removing its own?