Introduction of overlapping postfix26 package in EPEL-5?

[Steve Traylen]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:04 AM, Robert Scheck <robert at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Technically it should be possible to make the "postfix26" package somehow
> in parallel installable, but that requires a) patching postfix, b) lots and
> lots of testing and c) SELinux adaptions - a huge effort for less result.

As you say it's technically possible and looking at other packages many people
have gone to a lot of lengths to make packages co-exist. This is for me one
of big benefit's of EPEL over some other repositories is that I know
(hope) it won't
break existing installations. Of course there's a place for genuine updates of
packages and IUS is doing a good job providing that. I agree this is a major
pain at time times, e.g I've been trying to get a parallel version of
apr and apr-util
built in  a sensible way for some time now. I'd rather live with this
packaging pain though.

> I know the "Philosophy of EPEL" says "to never replace or interfere with
> packages shipped by Enterprise Linux", but why should we have more strong
> rules than Red Hat has? Let us look to python in EPEL-5: We're shipping
> python26* packages - isn't this a "replace packages shipped by Enterprise
> Linux" somehow?

python26 co-exists perfectly well with default python.



-- 
Steve Traylen