Les Mikesell wrote: > 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...). Yup - that drives me crazy, when someone's put a dependency on an *exact* rev of a library, rather than >=. And Lamar, that was a serious bit of research. Thanks for the job. mark