Dotan Cohen wrote:
EPEL is generally known to not overwrite distro files, but when it starts showing conflicts with the CentOS extras repo, that needs an additional note.
I think the point is that CentOS isn't 'the distro' that epel doesn't overwrite. And it really makes more sense for most additional content to be maintained in epel where it is available and compatible for RHEL and Scientific Linux users as well as CentOS. And since you are fairly likely to need at least some of the extensive content from epel, you might as well treat the centos plus/extras/testing repos as the 3rd party addons that they are, particularly in light of the frequent comments here that their only priority is compatibility with upstream.
Ooff, that sounds familiar. I jumped ship from Fedora around FC6, one of the reasons was constant dependency hell. I don't remember the details, but I really needed packages from both the Livna and Dag camps.
EPEL is "better" in that they make an effort to never replace base packages, but they consider RHEL as the base. You are usually safe leaving epel enabled for updates - but for a few things you may want newer packages from other repos where you have to be more careful.