On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, John Lee wrote:

Just curious, but why are there Fedora packages in Centos5 base repository? (i.e. blahblah.fc6.rpm) Are they compatible with CentOS?

That is a very good questions and I personally veel very sad that Red Hat chose to do this.

RHEL5 (and CentOS 5) are based on development done on Fedora Core 6. Red Hat started off with Fedora Core 6 when creating RHEL5. After some considerable QA, they were stuck with packages from Fedora Core 6 that were tagged with fc6 and were not rebuild for RHEL5, but verbatim copied from FC6.

Because they did not want to recompile and retag these packages, because it required them to redo QA, they chose to ship RHEL5 with the verbatim Fedora Core 6 packages.

As a result, CentOS chose to keep the original package names, including the fc6 tag for maximum compatibility. Even when it is confusing as hell !

Be aware though that the fc6-tagged packages in RHEL5 are verbatim copied packages from Fedora Core 6, but that on CentOS 5 the fc6-tagged packages are newly rebuild packages on a CentOS 5 system.

CentOS 5 (in contract to RHEL5) is completely self-hosting and CentOS is particularly proud of this. We actually did what Red Hat failed to do. But we have the legacy fc6-tag from RHEL5.

I hope this clears it up.

PS This also means that some, but not all the Fedora Core 6 packages work on RHEL5. That is one of the confusing parts of reality. In all cases you are better off with el5-tagged packages than fc6-tagged packages.