[CentOS] Re: New to CentOS, and wondering about application availability

Thu Jul 28 05:57:27 UTC 2005
Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>

On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:58 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> Bryan,
> I hope my comments about information gathering were not taken personally.

Why would they be?
Any comments I made were directed to people _other_ than yourself.  ;->

> Yes, that turned out to be the case. Thanks for suggesting this.

No problem.

The RPM database uses Berkeley Sleepycat DB, and it's implementation as
the RPM database is not setup to allow more than program to have write
access into it.

> Okay, now I'm over that obstacle, now I am curious. Why did Fedora seem 
> to be able to install things through yum immediately after install, and 
> CentOS had to do this key installation stuff?

Red Hat distributes a set of Fedora keys with its base install.  Same
deal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  If you start tapping repositories
that do not have keys in the base install, you'll need to add them too.

I'm not really up-to-snuff on the keys included with CentOS.  I deploy
RHEL far more than CentOS (my apologies).

I assume you already know this, but:  
- Any major "packages" system (DPKG, RPM) have a way for packages to be
signed
- Most major, automated "front-ends" (APT, YUM, UP2DATE) often check for
valid signatures on packages using existing keys
- Any keys not included in the base install will need to be imported
from a trusted source, so they can then be checked on packages to
guarantee they come from that trusted source

Ideally, the keys should come with the distro, but once you start adding
repositories, they don't always.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
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So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work.  ;->