[CentOS-devel] Why not a fusion between CentOS and SL?

[Les Mikesell]

On 3/24/2011 8:42 AM, Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>
>>> Also note that you can't just 'yum update' from those SL alpha versions to the
>>> final release, so even if CentOS did ship alpha/beta versions it wouldn't make
>>> life that much easier.  On the other hand it would be nice if yum knew enough to
>>> do that - or to understand different repositories and be able to always update
>>> from the same source or be told when to switch and reinstall.
>>
>> the new yum ( in fedora ) knows that, basically it prefers to install
>> from the same repo from where you already have stuff.
>
> Great ! This helps with cross-repository use in Yum.

I never quite understood why that wasn't designed in from the start.  It 
always had the assumption that all repositories were coordinated (or 
forced the end user to know more than was usually possible to know about 
them), when from the beginning the base repositories involved had 
policies that guaranteed that uncoordinated 3rd party repositories would 
always be a necessity.  The new rpmforge layout helps somewhat, but I've 
pretty much had to keep all 3rd party repos disabled and explicitly 
enable them with the command line switch just to install/update single 
packages.

And while I'm ranting about yum, there has to be a way to pick a 
repository mirror that doesn't load your caching proxy with a copy of 
every file from every mirror.  Since at least Centos 5 the mirrors are 
insanely fast so it really doesn't matter any more, but it still doesn't 
make much sense to make the mirrors do the extra work.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com