[elrepo] ELRepo, RPMForge and yum-priorities

[Phil Perry]

On 13/11/10 11:14, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
> Akemi Yagi wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:27 AM, Nicolas Kovacs<contact at kikinovak.net>   wrote:
>>> [base], [updates], [extras]
>>> enabled=1
>>> priority=1
>>>
>>> [elrepo]
>>> enabled=1
>>> priority=1
>>>
>>> [rpmforge]
>>> enabled=1
>>> priority=10
>>>
>
> everything Akemi said, except I would suggest giving an elrepo priority
> between 2 and 9, to make sure you never overwrite base+updates with
> elrepo without explicitely deciding to do so.
> Not that it's expected to happen often, but I still think it's the
> "right" way to configure things.
>
> Regards,
> Nicolas

That's a fair comment from Nicolas.

There are a couple occasions where we have to update packages from the 
base distro, but they are rare. One example is some of our updated hwmon 
driver packages require a newer version of lm_sensors to work so we ship 
a newer version as a dependency for those packages. We wouldn't 
recommend anyone otherwise updating that package unless needed. The 
other occasion was due to the bug Akemi mentioned above, where we 
shipped a fixed version of module-init-tools to address a very specific 
issue that affected elrepo until Red Hat (and subsequently CentOS/SL) 
could get a fixed version out.

The only issue with giving elrepo a priority lower (higher number) than 
base/updates is that when a package dependency dictates a package from 
base/updates should be updated (eg, as per the examples above) you will 
get an unresolved dependency error as priorities is preventing 
resolution of the dependency and hence the update from occurring.

We will always document on the Wiki and/or the mailing list(s) any 
exceptional cases where we need to update core packages from base/updates.

Regards,

Phil