[CentOS] CentOS-6 Status updates
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Jun 15 15:25:33 UTC 2011
On 6/15/2011 6:54 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
> Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>
>> Am I alone in regarding epel as more or less a part of CentOS?
>> Does it have a rival in this role?
>
> you may not be alone, but you're still wrong: epel is not part of centos
> at all.
> It's just another third party repo.
> There are others including some reputable and widely used:
> http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
It is the distribution and repository policies that make the third party
repos both necessary and problematic.
Start with the upstream distro policy of not including things that
aren't source-redistributable or have potential patent issues in the US,
so many people are forced elsewhere for usable video drivers and media
players. EPEL also follows these policies (being maintained by the same
company...) and also has a policy of not overwriting upstream packages
(where upstream is RH, not including centos extras/plus...). So EPEL is
generally safe as the only 3rd party addition, but it also won't have
what you need.
Then there is the usually-followed policy of not updating packages to
new versions within the life of the distro. So, for example, subversion
stayed at the ancient 1.4.x release shipped with 5.0 well beyond the
time the subversion team said to stop using it and update. Rpmforge is
the place to go for that sort of thing. Until recently they had
everything in one repo and many of the packages were newer than the
stock set, making it both useful and dangerous in terms of creating
dependency conflicts. It has recently been split into 3 repos so you
have more control over replacing stock packages or not (do a 'yum update
rpmforge-release' if you have it enabled, then look at the repo
entries). But, there is no coordination among the 3rd parties or the
main distro. So, if you had updated subversion and viewvc from rpmforge
to get code that the developers would still recommend using, and you
also had epel enabled, at some point your viewvc package would flip to
an update from epel with an incompatible configuration. Then when
upstream saw the error of its ways and finally went to a 1.6.x
subversion in the base 5.6 release, your update might flip there, with a
bunch of unresolved dependencies left over from the running rpmforge
package. Fun stuff. For something even weirder, look at what you would
have had to do to keep a working and up to date java on a RH-style
machine across the life of the 5.x distribution.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
More information about the CentOS
mailing list