On 2/26/2010 2:20 AM, John R Pierce wrote:
>
>>> epel is the best large 3rd party repo in terms of avoiding conflicts
>>> with the base.
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, I noticed that with rpmforge. I was just under the impression that
>> epel was a bit "dodgy" as repos come. Never too late to be enlightened
>> though. ;-)
>>
>
> the following is my opinion, and nothing else:
>
>
>
> epel doesn't use a repository tag in their RPM names. this makes it
> hard to use with other repositories.
All repositories are hard to use with other repositories. Yum doesn't
pay attention to repo tags, so all they do is help point out problems
after the fact. I think it was a dumb decision for epel to not use tags
but it is worse that yum doesn't track where it got things. For packages
you haven't installed yet, 'yum info packagename' will show the
repository location(s).
As an example of things that go wrong, on one machine I have subversion
and viewvc from rpmforge (to get a version that is not ancient), but
epel's build number for viewvc is higher and the rpmforge/epel versions
land in different places and are incompatible. So, with my usual
practice of leaving epel enabled during updates, I pick up epel's
newer-numbered package which overwrites some of the rpmforge version and
keeps some, leaving it very broken. But fortunately it's a standalone
package and not to hard to fix by removing the one you don't want and
re-installing with the right combination of enablerepo= and disablerepo=
on the yum command line. When this happens to things with a lot of
dependencies it is a real mess.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com