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

Thu May 24 19:34:09 UTC 2012
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

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