On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg@imag.fr wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Lamar Owenlowen@pari.edu wrote:
1.) EPEL doesn't make it a priority (or even a goal) to work well with any other third-party repository;
True enough as a fact, but it sort-of sounds like a criticism for something that's not really practical.
Whether you interpret it as criticism is your brain's doing, Lamar's sentence is simply stating a well-documented fact. And it is very practical and relevant in a thread about repositories (note the trailing *S*).
Yes, but it just seems odd to single out EPEL in that regard. In the general case, hardly any third party repositories coordinate with each other and when they do at all the most common scenario (remi, for example) is that they expect you to have EPEL enabled for dependencies.
But back to the OP's last question. You don't 'need' to enable 3rd party repositories at all to use Centos or keep it updated. It will install with the Centos repositories enabled and you can subsequently 'yum install' anything that is part of the distribution and a 'yum update' will track anything installed from there. However, there is a great variety of additional free software that can be added and kept up to date with almost no additional effort from additional repositories.