[CentOS] Oracle Linux - oracle-epel vs epel - dnf priority

On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 13:41, Frank Cox <theatre at sasktel.net> wrote:

> I'd like to run this by you guys and get your opinion.
>
> For those of us who are considering moving to Oracle Linux (or at least
> doing some experimenting with it), I just had an idea for dealing with the
> fact that the oracle-el-epel apparently doesn't have all of the packages
> that are in the fedora-el-epel that we all know and love.
>
> It makes sense to me to use the oracle epel with OL to the greatest extent
> possible simply because it's part of OL.
>
> To get around the missing package issue, what about setting up both
> oracle-epel and fedora-epel, and then using the dnf priorities to pick the
> stuff from oracle-epel first and if it's not there then grab it from
> fedora-epel.
>
>

Having done this for years.. choose one or the other. Do NOT mix the two.
You will end up with heartache and sleepless nights trying to figure out
why things are broken. If you are lucky it is something easy like an update
is broken because the missing EPEL package wants a library that the OEL has
an older version of. In other cases it is the same thing but the soname was
good enough to make rpm think it would work.

I say this as a former EPEL package leader.. either use Oracle EPEL and
figure out how to interact with them to get their rebuilds done faster or
do the same with Fedora EPEL. Priorities and similar filtering tools work
well enough if you have focused repositories where small sets may overlap
but you want X to take over from Y. In the case of nearly 1:1 repos, you
will end up with it working 95%-99% of the time and then burning down the
house.




-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.