Shaping repos according to terminology (was: Choosing YUM Repositories)

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 15:59, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > 
> > What currently valid reason is there for breaking the ability
> > to get the stock distribution updates? Can't everything that
> > has to be recompiled with different options also be renamed or
> > relocated?
> 
> No, certainly not everything. And if you relocate all to /usr/local
> what benefits will you have???

The same benefits you have from compiling from source to /usr/local.
You don't break anything already existing in the distribution and
you don't lose the ability to get updates to anything from
the distribution.

> You would either have /usr/local before /usr, so it's the same like
> unistalling the old package, or after, which is the same like not
> installing the new one ...

Yes, as a side effect you could still run the stock package if
you wanted, but that is probably less useful than the fact that
you would not have introduced RPM dependency conflicts that
keep you from doing updates.

> > > For having users decide their experimentation level themselves, some
> > > repos have stability split repos, which is a far more useful thing to
> > > do.
> > 
> > It doesn't make much sense to me to call a repo stable if it is
> > still allowed to contain rpms that conflict with the distribution's
> > own.
> 
> Not if you are defining "updates"/"enhances" equal to "conflicts". In
> this manner even updates-released is not stable, as it "conflicts"
> core packages ... :)

By 'conflicts', I mean has the potential to introduce dependencies
on different versions of the same-named packages.  As long as everything
is compiled in the same environment that won't happen.  If a 3rd party
repo replaces a stock library with a different modification and has a
package that depends on it, what is supposed to happen when the
distribution releases a needed update to that library and package
updates that depend on it?   There is usually no equivalent problem if
you compile extra stuff from source and keep it all under /usr/local,
including non-standard libraries.

> Almost all my setups are Fedora Core/RHEL full installs with ATrpms
> upon that (and more). Nothing _conflicts_, and it *is* _stable_.

And no replaced stock RPMs?  Can you be sure that it will still
be stable regardless of what is pulled from the distribution's
updates?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com