On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
Probably so, and I know how to do that, but I wasn't illustrating a specific workaround, just illustrating the problem.
Yes, you are right to bring it up, but I don't think it should scare people off. You just have to pay attention.
The bottom line: out of the about 6,000 packages in EPEL, there are 7% or so that have the same name but a different version in RPMforge; out of the about 4,400 (4,381 listed by yum repolist) package in RPMforge, there are 9.5% or so that have the same name but a different version in EPEL. If anything you are running relies on any of those 417 packages, you have a potential for problems.
So, it's not rare.
But many, probably most of those cases are revs with forward/backward compatibility. It's hard to generalize about that, though. Even in the scalpel case you mentioned the up-rev lib was likely compatible but just specified as requiring an exact version in the spec file. And on the other side there are things like viewvc that are at the same rev in epel and rpmforge but have slightly different and incompatible configurations (and there is a reason I know that...).