[CentOS] how to push the bounds and get newer packages for centos 5.4?

Thu Feb 18 14:20:28 UTC 2010
Mathieu Baudier <mbaudier at argeo.org>

> I use epel (has a lot of different stuff but generally does not have newer
> versions of standard packages), rpmforge (sometimes has newer stuff and may
> cause some conflicts) remi (up to date ocsinventory-server, php, mysql), and
> opennms (Sun JVM 1.5 and opennms).  Normally I leave epel enabled in the yum

We use as well:

- EPEL: their missions statement is that they will NEVER update base:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#Does_EPEL_replace_packages_provided_within_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_or_layered_products.3F

- RpmForge: but we rather tend to enable it and use includepkgs in the
repo file to add the packages we are interested in (in order to get
their updates)

- ElRepo: useful for drivers for a desktop install

- for all other stuff we tend to rebuild SRPMS picked-up at different
places and maintain our own repositories (using createrepo to generate
the metadata, and putting them on a standard httpd server, this is not
a big deal).

Good sources for SRPMS are
  - the personal repo of Karanbir: http://centos.karan.org/
  - older fedora distributions (going down from the latest to Fedora
6), sometimes requires a bit of hacking of the spec files:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist
  - finally, looking in RPM search engines for the proper SRPM: like
http://rpm.pbone.net/

Then there are also "specialized" repositories that may address your needs.

Some that I heard of but not really tested:
- Latest PHP and Python (you may be especially interested in this
one!): http://iuscommunity.org/packages/
(there was some arguments around it in the docs mailing list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/centos-docs@centos.org/msg03260.html)
- PostgreSQL: http://yum.pgsqlrpms.org/
- etc.