Diversity adds a lot of value. If EPEL will be only repo nobody on RHEL workstation can see/listen MP3, WMA, DVD playing, because of interesting US software patent and millenium act law.
That's not what I meant. Obviously we need additional packages in other repositories and that will be true as long as there is any policy that might exclude any contribution to a centrally managed repository. The question is, why do we need/want different versions of the same-named packages, or packages that provide different versions of the same files that can overwrite each other based on conditions we can't control? There probably is a good reason to want this - I just can't think of it right now.
That's easy:
(this is example, has no reflection to current state ...)
EPEL provides xmms-1.2.10-1.i586.rpm - but without MP3, WMA, AAC ... DAG provides xmms-1.2.9-1.rf.i586.rpm - with all those beasts ATRPM provides xmms-1.2.10-1.at.i586.rpm - with all those beasts
Which you installs? Who knows, probably EPEL ...
Solution?
Repo priorities and includes
[base] name=CentOS-$releasever - Base mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&rep... #baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/ gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4 *priority=1*
# Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 4 - dag # URL: http://rpmforge.net/ [rpmforge-CO] name = RPMforge.net-EL 4 mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/mirrors-rpmforge gpgkey = http://dag.wieers.com/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt gpgcheck = 1 enabled = 0 *priority=80* *includepkgs=xmms**
[epel] name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 - $basearch #baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/$basearch mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-5&arch=$basearch failovermethod=priority enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL *priority=99* *# this is yust for sure priprities should do it better* *exclude=xmms**