[CentOS-devel] Re: Third repos CentOS 5 compatibility

Mon May 7 13:42:00 UTC 2007
John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>

Rex Dieter wrote:
> Axel Thimm wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, May 05, 2007 at 04:38:04PM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> 
>>>> But also very disappointed from the course that EPEL chose to take wrt
>>>> to all other 3rd party repos. He's currently stripping off repotags
>>>> from his repo cursing all day people in EPEL that forced him to do
>>>> this.
>>> Maybe if we all can agree to some ground rules, then all repos can play
>>> nice.  See proposal:
>>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/RepositoryCollaboration
>> These rules should had been going w/o saying
> 
> I agree, but this seems necessary for some(*).  Without acknowledgment of
> equal-footing for all parties, progress will be a very uphill battle.
> 
> -- Rex
> 
> (*) Since I continue to hear gripes about which repos were first or (should)
> have priority or clout.

Without straining my brain too much, I find it hard to imagine how you 
can positively mandate what order the repos should be considered for 
someone whose needs you don't know. Mine, say.

What I think is needed is a clear, obvious way to say I want rpmforge 
for  madwifi, atrpms for, um, postgresql, Fedora for KDE (I'm being 
ridiculous, you say? Let me!), and standard Centos5 repos for everything 
else. Oh, just a mo, I'll have Oracle for Java (assuming it's there).

I don't care whether rpmforge has newer postgresql, it's atrpm's I want, 
and I want rpmforge madwifi but never postgresql.

Any repo might have newer something that I want, but I don't want the 
newest, I want the one from the source I nominate.

And so it's perfectly clear to anyone how to do this, the Right Way 
needs to stick out like Gillie's ears (with apologies to Adam Gilchrist 
fans).

If this means a modification to yum is required, then a modification to 
yum is required.

The fact you decide (assuming you do) that rpmforge is the premier 
third-party repo does not of itself mean that all your users will agree 
with you.

I got into a bit of a mess with Debian, back when Woody was "stable" and 
had been for two or more years. There were newer Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, 
all sorts of stuff built for Woody, and I found myself using a long list 
of repos, and getting stuff from places I didn't intend.

Debian does have a means if pinning software to particular repos, but 
one has to read the documentation fairly closely to discover it. Or 
complain loudly that no such facility exists.

More recently has been the advent of backports.org which has lots of 
little repos. One for postgresql. One for mysql. One (I expect) for php. 
(Actually, there may be several sometimes, but if php 5.0 in testing got 
replaced by php 5.2, then php 5.0 would vanish from backports too). 
Probably there was one for xen 3.0, I'm not sure I looked.

Once one finds backports.org, it is suitably simple to control what 
comes from where: in fact, it's hard not to.

Package naming is still important, so as to ensure an easy upgrade from 
unofficial extras to subsequent official packages. Debian has a policy 
to guide that too.





-- 

Cheers
John

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