Fedora 4 Error in Transaction while setting Up Updates;

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 20:28 -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 2:31 PM +0200 7/17/05, Levin Fritz wrote:
> >Hello Mirco,
> >in general, mixing too many repositories is not a good idea, because the
> >more repositories you use, the more likely there's some sort of conflict
> >between them. In particular,
> >
> >* don't mix Livna and Freshrpms/Dag. They provide a lot of the same
> >packages but the maintainers don't work together so there's a high
> >chance of conflicts. You should either enable Livna and disable
> >Freshrpms and Dag or disable Livna and enable Freshrpms and Dag.
> 
> Since I don't really understand it myself and would like to know: is it
> safe to do yum installs from mutually incompatible repos by enabling only
> one of them at a time?

Yes and no.

Supposing there are two mutually incompatible repo sets, A and B. Both
contain software that you want to use that isn't included in the other
set.

I would be inclined to enable normally the set (let's say A) that had
the highest number of packages in it that I wanted. I could then install
the remaining packages from B using:

# yum --enablerepo=B install pkg1 pkg2 ...

This will work in many situations. However, it may be that some of the
packages you want from B have dependencies on libraries or other
packages that you are already sourcing from A. So some of your packages
from A *may* be replaced by the versions from B. This *may* result in
dependency errors next time you do a "yum update" without enabling B.

As a result, you might consider disabling both A and B by default. But
then you would miss out on updates (potentially important security
updates) from both A and B.

So the answer really is that it depends on your particular set of
circumstances and requirements. But if you can source all your
requirements without using mutually-incompatible repos, it'll make life
simpler.

> How well does using smartpm do to avoid such troubles?  (Modulo such
> packages being added later to a high priority repo such as extras and the
> confusion that will result.)

Good question. I don't know.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>