[CentOS-devel] getting epel-release into CentOS-7- extras/

On 09/02/2014 12:14 PM, Michael Lampe wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Michael Lampe
>> <mlampe0 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>> What about some kind of preconfigured protection of base
>>> repositories? Epel
>>> doesn't live up to their own standards of not replacing system packages:
>>>
>>> # yum -d3 update | grep epel
>>>
>>>   --> advancecomp-1.19-1.el7.x86_64 from epel excluded (priority)
>> (etc.)
>>


While it's certainly not true in all cases, quite a few of the
'excluded' packages come from owning a common directory rather than
actual conflicting files. We found a few of these early on during our
testing with 7. Of the ones we found (at the time) none actually
conflicted, but were excluded due to shared ownership of a plugin
directory like /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages

These should still certainly be corrected.




>> Isn't this something that should really be automated with some kind of
>> scanning at the repository level (for both package and file name
>> conflicts)?
>>
> 
> What if some package from epel gets included by RH with an update? This
> happened several times in the past and epel always kept their package
> available, even if had a higher version number than the now official RH
> package.


This shouldn't happen, and its stuff like this that we'll be working to
address in the future. The EPEL Steering Committee has been reformed[1],
and one of the topics has been a cleanup and better documentation of
epel policy[2].

So this sort of thing should be minimized moving forward.


1.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2014-August/010060.html

2.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2014-August/009943.html



-- 
Jim Perrin
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