[CentOS] other repositories question

Mon Nov 7 10:56:41 UTC 2005
dan1 <dan1 at edenpics.com>

>On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 00:14 +0100, dan1 wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> I would like to know how other repositories than the official ones for
>> CentOS 4 affect an update of a package if a package is present in both
>> repositories.
>> Will yum install the package that it finds having the highest version
>> number ? and if so, is there a mean to tell yum that we would like to
>> keep the preference to one repository instead of the highest version
>> number on a possibly other repository ?
>>
>> I ask that because I realise that having multiple repositories added
>> to yum might mix up things if the packages placed there are compiled
>> for newer versions, and even possibly create another system than
>> CentOS by updating several main common packages. That would do
>> something between a CentOS and a cAos distribution, is that right ?
>
>Yes, if you have a newer version in a repository and you add that full
>repo, the newest version will get installed.
>
>But with yum > 2.2.x there is a feature called "includepkgs="
>>
>> For example, I would like to use Dag Wieers' repos, but I am in fear
>> that some mix up might happen if there are several same packages with
>> different versions than the official CentOS ones (and is it possible
>> to have same packages there? ).
>
>With "includepkgs=" you can make an entry like this in the definition
>for the Dag repo:
>
>includepkgs=rsync iptraf
>
>It would then only look at rsync and iptraf from dags repo
>
>See this link for an in depth review of yum:
>
>http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/index.html

Hello, Johnny.

Thank you for that useful information.
Do you know if there is a list of packages that are the same that the 
official ones on the Dag repo, so that I might put them in the 'exclude' 
list on the official repo ?

My goal is to take all packages by default from the official centOS 
repositories, but all other packages that are not present there but present 
in Dag wieers' repo should be accessible and updatable.
Isn't there a way to tell that to yum with a simple command, so that if Dag 
is adding a package which is already present in the official repo it would 
not be updated from there but still from the official centos repo? With the 
'includepkgs' method we should list all packages that are not present in the 
official repo and also as soon as Dag adds a new package it would not be 
accessible apart if we periodically update a list that we must create 
ourselves and that would be not a clean solution.
Is my assumption correct ?
If yes, then a tag like 'pkgsauthority=yes' in the repository options could 
do the trick. That would tell yum that it must take all packages it can find 
in that repo as the official ones, even if there is another in some other 
repo with a higher version. However, any package not listed here but present 
in another one would be used there for update or install.

In my example, I would place that tag in the centos repositories.
That way, we could really ensure that we have a clean, not modified, 
official CentOS distribution server running, and all very useful Dag's 
packages would still be available.
My concern is that with any other repository, people would place there the 
same packages and that this particular version of the package would break up 
something. This is to avoid having a cAos like system and still keep the 
versionning from RHEL safely.

What do you think ?

Regards,
Daniel