It's not without it's problems though, especially when using yum... Blindly playing with this repository can be bad for your system's health, plenty of care and attention is required...

The packages require quite a bit of ongoing maintence once installed and not all versions are stable... The packages don't tend to carry much documentation, the reported requirements are not always accurate and the package clean up routines are never complete...

yum update girlfriend doesn't typically work too well if a prior version is already installed, newer versions get installed then a cleanup happens afterwards, race conditions exist where the previous version can do lots of bad things to your system while both versions are effectively installed at the same time... a yum remove girlfriend before a fresh yum install girlfriend is recommended... Care should still be taken as yum will attempt to honour the package dependancies and other packages such as pet, house and car could be removed when trying to remove girlfriend, especially if any of those were installed after girlfriend and more so if it was requires of the girlfriend package that triggered their installation... Typically there are significant system reconfigurations required to support each new version... yum reinstall doesn't always work too well with girlfriend, the package does tend to leave quite a bit of state information in place, even after uninstall, which, if this is the cause of the problems, won't be fixed by a reinstall...

An upgrade of girlfriend to wife exists, it's not cheap though and potentially can require some major system reconfiguration to support... yum can't really handle this, often getting confused between the option of upgrading to wife or updating to a later release of girlfriend... The upgrade to wife can be forced in certain situations such as if any child packages have been accidentally installed, such as by automatic overnight updates...

With wife installed, yum will let you install additional versions of girlfriend, but, this is not a recommended configuration as there are some very serious interoperability issues, especially if an installation of girlfriend pulls in a child update... In that situation, yum would try to upgrade girlfriend to wife, but, as you can't, in a standard configuration, have multiple instances of wife and newer versions of wife obsolete older versions, the old version would need to be removed, the massive number of unresolvable dependancies involved in the that would cause yum to crash... The only solution is to use rpm with varying force and nodeps options to attempt to get your system functional again, though even then, bits of old packages will still be lying around consuming resources, especially if child packages exist...

So, while the packages can work, there is quite a bit of work involved in fully integrating them and maintaining them... yum can be used, but, it's probably best to exclude them in yum.conf and manually install and update the packages where you find necessary, taking great care in avoiding conflicts and managing dependancies... The extra care taken in doing it manually can really pay off in long term system stability...