[CentOS] Third party repo differences (was: Re: Repositories in CentOS 5.8)

Thu May 24 19:26:02 UTC 2012
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
>
> Probably so, and I know how to do that, but I wasn't illustrating a specific workaround, just illustrating the problem.

Yes, you are right to bring it up, but I don't think it should scare
people off.  You just have to pay attention.


> The bottom line: out of the about 6,000 packages in EPEL, there are 7% or so that have the same name but a different version in RPMforge; out of the about 4,400 (4,381 listed by yum repolist) package in RPMforge, there are 9.5% or so that have the same name but a different version in EPEL.  If anything you are running relies on any of those 417 packages, you have a potential for problems.
>
> So, it's not rare.

But many, probably most of those cases are revs with forward/backward
compatibility.  It's hard to generalize about that, though.  Even in
the scalpel case you mentioned the up-rev lib was likely compatible
but just specified as requiring an exact version in the spec file.
And on the other side there are things like viewvc that are at the
same rev in epel and rpmforge but have slightly different and
incompatible configurations (and there is a reason I know that...).

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com