On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 1:44 AM, Nikolaos Milas nmilas@noa.gr wrote:
There is no such thing as a 100% reliable system if you don't do things right. You can easily screw (in terms of security and reliability) your Vanilla RHEL/CentOS with one wrong setting, even using your safe repos.
Breaking it yourself is a different issue than installing conflicting things from uncoordinated repositories though. The underlying problem is that using newer packages often requires replacing core libraries. Any single 3rd party repo doing this will probably test things together, but if you combine 2 or more of these you are mixing untested code, likely to have had different compile options, etc. This seems especially bad in the RH/CentOS world because the core repos and epel have very restrictive policies on what can be there and the 3rd party repos are intentionally uncoordinated. I think the debian/Ubuntu world has many more packages in at least loosely coordinated repos. You can still run into problems but you are less likely to be the first person to every mix a particular set of packages in an install.