[CentOS] What's wrong with yum-priorities?

Akemi Yagi wrote:
> In my humble opinion, the
> wiki article should provide ample explanation. Failing that, it should
> at least offer alternative methods (for example, use of exclude= etc
> ?).  If not, it would be basically saying, "do not use 3rd party
> repositories". 

You can't escape the fact that when you use 3rd party repositories that do not 
coordinate their package names and dependencies, having a working system is just 
a matter of luck and chance.  Or that when the base repositories exclude 
packages by policy, that you will be forced to use 3rd party repos.  So, good luck.

I generally leave the extra repos disabled in the yum configuration and 
install/update the packages I want from them with:
yum --enablerepo=reponame install packagename
but there's still a chance that one of these packages or something pulled as a 
dependency will cause subsequent conflicts.

> People come to this page because they need/want/have
> to resort to 3rd party repos. When asked in the CentOS forums, I refer
> them to the Repositories article and I continue to advise them to use
> the priorities plugin.

It doesn't matter how you do it.  There is still a chance that a file included 
in a 3rd party package that you install will subsequently be included in a base 
package update.  And then you'll have the conflict regardless of any way you try 
to control the priorities.  An example now would be if you had installed 
something that required libgcrypt11 from ATrpms.  Now the 
/usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11 file will conflict with an update to the stock 
libgcrypt-1.4.4-5.el5.i386.rpm package.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com