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

Thu Mar 24 16:50:47 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 3/24/2011 10:44 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
>>>> On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>
>> Because the yellowdog updater-modified developers didn't have that lofty of a goal in mind from the start?
>>

I think it was the opposite - that they had the lofty goal of having all 
repositories coordinated even though that is clearly impossible unless 
you can dictate a jailed iphone-like world.

> Actually because (historically) cross-repositories Just Don't Work without some
> artifact like "repository priority" which is too coarse grained
> fto work generally (Dag's priority scheme works well, just not everyone
> does as carefukl work as Dag et al do).
>
> Just restating what you said more specifically ...

Sure, it can't work if you generalize it to an infinite number of 
repositories that each can have any version of any library they want, 
but in practice what you want to happen is to pull only the necessary 
components from a 3rd party repo, and thereafter only update those from 
the repo where they originated.  This mostly works and is what people 
usually try to accomplish in ways that end up being worse than having 
yum track it automatically.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com