RHEL6 Workstation vs. EPEL6 Conflict Check and a few resulting questions

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:26:44 -0500
inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This week I took a few minutes and compared packages on a RHEL6
> Workstation install with EPEL packages available to it. Here is what I
> found.

Excellent. Thanks for working on it. 

> IDENTICAL VERSIONS

...snip...

> I was surprised to find so many packages in EPEL with the same version
> as the same package in RHEL. While this doesn't cause any problems in
> cases where the RHEL package is already installed in other cases, a
> new install or something pulled in by another dependency, will grab
> the EPEL package in a more or less default configuration which doesn't
> seem to be a good thing to be happening.
>
> Why are there all these packages in EPEL with an identical version to
> packages in RHEL?

I suspect almost all of these were added into EPEL because RHEL did
not ship them on all arches. The current guidelines for this have us
requiring a _lower_ version, but in the past before we had this hashed
out the advise was 'the same version'. 

I'm not really sure how to fix these now. We could unpush them and
push out older versions, but then anyone who had the others installed
would never ever see updates. 
 
> HIGHER VERSION IN EPEL

...snip...

> Some of these have been corrected and the rest now have bugs filed
> against them. The only one that I'm curious about really is koan which
> conflicts with the same package in the rhn-tools channel. While my gut
> thinks that should be considered part of base RHEL I don't know if it
> ever has been?!

Historically it has not been. It's been: base, optional, ha and
cluster. 

> HIGHER VERSION IN RHEL
...snip...

> This last group is harmless as far as I'm can tell.

Likely they are from when something was in EPEL only and was added
later in a newer RHEL minor release. It would be good to clean them up. 

kevin
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