RFC: Rethinking EPEL at FUDcon Lawrence 2013

[Matthias Runge]

On 11/23/2012 09:47 AM, Tomáš Smetana wrote:
> And does every package have to be present in all the channels? I can imagine
> a package having a different maintainer in each channel or not to be present
> in some at all: if maintaining more versions at once or backporting patches
> is beyond the maintainers possibilities, he may decide to only re-package the
> new upstream stuff in "unstable" or just backport critical patches to the
> "old" channel.
> 
> Yes, I understand this may shift the complications to the users who will have
> to invent more complicated yum configurations to get the right packages from
> the right channels.
> 
> Regards,
> 
In my opinion, it's not necessary to have each package in each
repository. Yum will do it's magic and select that package with the
highest version number. E.g if you choose just the base EPEL-6 branch,
then you should get the latest version of your desired package from
there. If you also enabled e.g. EPEL-6.1 and the package from there is
newer, then yum will fetch it from there. If that package doesn't exist
there, you'll get, what's in EPEL-6.

So using newer versions which may include upgrades, you'll need to
enable another repository.
But to be clear, I just intend ONE version upgrade for a package for
each new repo, so when you chose to enable that newer repo, you'll stick
on that provided version.

Matthias

-- 
Matthias Runge <mrunge at matthias-runge.de>
               <mrunge at fedoraproject.org>