Yet another frustration with Fedora package management

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> Hedayat Vatankhah wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>> Summary: Try to prevent a package from being updated/installed from
>> repositories regardless of the package management tool you use. As it
>> seems, then only way you can do this is to exclude it from the
>> repositories themselves inside their configuration file in
>> /etc/yum.repos.d/,
> ...
>> Suggestion: Please add a single configuration file to configure common
>> package manager options
>
> I think you answered your own question => modify the .repo files
>
> -- Rex

This is usually a poor approach for anything that needs to be excluded
from multiple repos. The GUI's also have no idea about this kind of
editing, and little or no ability to control the option if it's being
done manually without their knowledge of its uses. The classic example
is 'mysql-libs' from RHEL, when using a Percona or SCL yum
configuration. The library is present as a "meta" package in packages
that are not called 'mysql-libs'. Hilarity ensues when trying to do an
update. The overlapping packages, with different names, meant that
setting up a 3rd party repository requires editing the repo files of
the base or other 3rd party repositories as added. Hilarity ensues,
especially if there are "testing" respositories added later which are
not enabled by default and the machine owner does not know to modify
the new repo files.

A safer approach is to use "exclude" options in the /etc/yum.conf, but
this gets bogged down fast and can lead to quite dangerous manual
auditing of core configuration files. I'd frankly prefer to see a
"/etc/yum.exclude' included in yum by default, and that file included
by default in /etc/yum.conf. I'd love to see that kind of architecture
in dnf as well.