[CentOS] stock openjdk vs. epel

Scott Silva wrote:
> on 6-1-2009 9:43 AM Les Mikesell spake the following:
>> If you have the epel repo installed and enabled during a yum update, you 
>> get java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-1.0.b12.el5.2 instead of the stock .b09 
>> version.  Is this intentional and desirable?  I thought epel generally 
>> did not replace stock components with newer versions.
>>
> Any third party repo has the potential to replace base files. That is why the
> priorities and the protectbase plugins were written.

Obviously they have the potential - and almost equally obviously an end 
user will have no idea what to choose even if they do have a tiny bit of 
control over yum (but no way to see where their existing version came 
from).  But I thought that long ago I asked if epel would supply a newer 
Firefox or OpenOffice (back when it was needed and RHEL hadn't done it 
yet...) and someone replied that it would not be epel policy to 
overwrite stock packages.  Was that not correct - or have things changed?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com