[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 1:01 PM, Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk> wrote:
> On 15/09/12 17:04, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>> I disagree.  I'd much rather see commonly needed 3rd party repos
>> included but with enabled=0. settings.
>
>
> But that's not your decision to make - it's a decision for the repo
> themselves how they configure their repo in their config file.

If it is included, it can be patched.   Debian/ubuntu do this somewhat
sensibly but there you have to make a one-time selection to enable the
extra repos.  I think it is nicer to keep the alternative ones (except
maybe EPEL) disabled.

> The way for a distro to have "control" is not to install the
> repo-release package by default to start with, just have it present in
> the repos if that's what people want.

That's sort-of reasonable, but the thing you need to be able to do is
"yum search" across the repos or "yum info" a package that may be in
one or more them.  To even do that, you have to install the repo
files.  And then you'll probably have them enabled and likely to
clobber things in an update when you just wanted to look.

> A sensible criteria for including any repo might be that if it replaces
> packages from the distro then it should be disabled (enabled=0) by
> default, but it's not a setting for you (the distro) to change.

That's not the only criteria.   Some packages don't upgrade gracefully
or take extra manual actions (opennms, drbl, probably others...).  And
you may not want to selectively disable them on every yum update run
when you want normal updates.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com