Yum packages (again)

[Tim]

On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 10:23 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Though this is technically true, it's unhelpful to the naive user (and
> we're all naive at some time or another). It would not be beyond
> reason for Yum to know that certain repos work well with each other
> and others don't, and to warn the user when conflicts might occur. A
> plugin perhaps? 

The last few times I've added repos, I've always had to do manually.
That involves going to the website for the repo, and getting a RPM or
copying a configuration file to /etc, or reading instructions about
doing this from some other website.  I've seen warnings on those pages
that some repos aren't compatible, and explicitly named them.  That's
probably the best place to list the problems.  But then they can only
warn about repos that they're aware of, or have tested.

Sure, a setup RPM from Livna, for instance, could name the ATRPMS setup
as a conflicting package, but that might raise the ire of some.  A
conflict wouldn't be a warning, but would abort setting things up, and
perhaps some users are able to manage such conflicts themselves.  But if
it refuses to install, they're not able to do so.

Fedora doesn't talk about certain repos for legal reasons discussed to
death on here.  So, you could hardly expect the Fedora supplied yum
configuration files to specifically mention them, either.

The last two points makes it rather hard to programatically avoid the
problem.

Yum can't really handle conflicts between repos, as requirements simply
say the filenames that they depend on, not which repo the files come
from.  So an incompatible library.so from one repo, with a same-named
library.so from another repo is going to be a problem.

Really, the only solution is for repos not to produce incompatible
packages, but I can't see that happening any time soon.

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