Akemi Yagi wrote:
In my humble opinion, the wiki article should provide ample explanation. Failing that, it should at least offer alternative methods (for example, use of exclude= etc ?). If not, it would be basically saying, "do not use 3rd party repositories".
You can't escape the fact that when you use 3rd party repositories that do not coordinate their package names and dependencies, having a working system is just a matter of luck and chance. Or that when the base repositories exclude packages by policy, that you will be forced to use 3rd party repos. So, good luck.
I generally leave the extra repos disabled in the yum configuration and install/update the packages I want from them with: yum --enablerepo=reponame install packagename but there's still a chance that one of these packages or something pulled as a dependency will cause subsequent conflicts.
People come to this page because they need/want/have to resort to 3rd party repos. When asked in the CentOS forums, I refer them to the Repositories article and I continue to advise them to use the priorities plugin.
It doesn't matter how you do it. There is still a chance that a file included in a 3rd party package that you install will subsequently be included in a base package update. And then you'll have the conflict regardless of any way you try to control the priorities. An example now would be if you had installed something that required libgcrypt11 from ATrpms. Now the /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11 file will conflict with an update to the stock libgcrypt-1.4.4-5.el5.i386.rpm package.