Choosing YUM Repositories

[Tony Nelson]

At 9:52 AM +0200 8/7/05, Peter Boy wrote:
 ...
>You are right, but it may be a problem, if a repo replaces packages
>without the user beeing aware of it. And it is quite difficult to use
>yours or dag's repo sometimes. If you do a yum update with all repos
>activated, some packages will be updated by your repo or dag's, weather
>those packages I use from your repo require it or not!  That is
>definitely a problem, I think. And such a replacement may introduce
>problems for other software which are not visible in terms of the rpm
>classifications.
>
>Therefore there is a urgent need for cooperation to simplify things.
 ...

Fedora's packages sometimes include FC# (FC3, FC4) as part of the Release
field.  If all packages included some such thing in the Release we would
have a much easier time sorting such stuff out.  All packages from Fedora
would have FC# or FE#, all packages from Livna might have Li# (or LiS#,
LiU#, and LiT#) or some such, ATRPMs might be At#, and so on.  Currently,
packages normally contain Packager and Vendor tags, but these don't
actually specify the repository.

Alternatively, RPM could be modified to have a new tag in the preamble, but
I think that would be more difficult all around.  Extending the sometime
practice of marking packages with FC# would be something that could be done
by each packager independently, with a minimum of cooperation.

Once it looked like this was happening, the tools like yum could be
extended to make some use of it in resolving or reporting conflicts.

I plan to mark my own packages with my initials (Release: 1_GAN).  It's not
perfect, but it should be good enough.
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>