On 05/01/12 19:44, Paul Stauffer wrote:
On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 01:29:48PM -0600, Adam Miller wrote:
On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 01:15:15PM -0600, Ken Teh wrote:
Quick question?
I needed some packages from epel so I added the epel rpms from SL6x. Is
it okay to leave the yum.repos.d/epel.repo enabled? Are there packages
on epel that will clobber the SL6x packages during the nightly updates?
Thanks!
The policy on EPEL packages and updates are to not clobber anything
shipped by Red Hat in RHEL proper (including the optional channels in RHN)
so pending what all from RHEL is put together to make SL I would imagine
its quite safe. I personally run EPEL on my RHEL, SL, and CentOS machines
and to date have not run into a package clobber issue (though I have a
number of times with third party repos that aren't EPEL). That is not to
say it won't ever happen, but I've never personally found an instance in
which it did and the EPEL folks do make an effort to keep it from
happening. I personally think its pretty safe, but YMMV.
-AdamM
I would second Adam's comments. Plus, if you are installing some packages
from EPEL, you will probably want to leave it enabled so that those packages
are kept up to date as well.
If you want to verify the effects of enabling EPEL (or any other 3rd party
repo, for that matter), just enable it, and then manually run "yum update".
It will print out the list of updates it proposes to apply, along with the
repo each package is from. You can read through the list to see if it looks
like anything from the 3rd party repo is going to update a package from the
core repos, and if you're not comfortable with anything, just answer "N" to
the prompt and disable the repo again.
cheers,
- Paul
Using EPEL is generally safe, specially if it's the only 3rd party repo
you're using. However, together with Atrpms or RpmForge, there might be
some issues with package version differing from EPEL and the other
repos. One example is when installing vlc from RpmForge, which pulls the
libmodplug and libudev libraries from EPEL (more recent) although it
requires RpmForge's one.
Best pratice is:
1) set priorities or protectbase up to avoid 3rd party repos being able
to override your RH/Centos/SL base installation,
2) enabling one 3rd party repo at a time and perform the installation of
the wanted package,
3) if a conflict occurs, identify the problematic packages and resolve
the conflict (usually using the exclude option in yum repository config
files)
4) once your system is set up, 3rd party repos should be disabled.
Although, opinions are mixed about whether to keep the repos enabled or
not, my personal experience dictates me not to do so.
Hope this helps. This CentOS wiki article can help:
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
Ghis
