Fedora "backports" repo?

[James Antill]

On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 01:29 +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> Michał Piotrowski wrote:
> > 2010/9/21 Björn Persson <bjorn at xn--rombobjrn-67a.se>:
> > > How hard would it be to "cherry-pick" from this backports repository? To
> > > install a newer Firefox from there for example, but keep the PostgreSQL
> > > from the ordinary Fedora even if there is a newer one in the backports
> > > repository, and with a simple "yum update" receive bugfixes to
> > > PostgreSQL from fedora-updates and new Firefox versions from the
> > > backports repository?
> > > 
> > > If the backports repository would be an "all or nothing" thing, or if
> > > cherry-picking would require special tweaking of Yum, then it's a bad
> > > idea.
> > 
> > yum-plugin-priorities?
> 
> The first thing I notice is that that plugin comes with exactly zero 
> documentation. A wiki page from CentOS and two posts on some random blogs give 
> some configuration examples and also warn about dangers that only a Yum hacker 
> will fully understand. Neither explains how to install selected packages from 
> a lower-prioritized repository, but my crystal ball indicates that it would be 
> troublesome compared to normal Yum usage.
> 
> Apparently all repositories have the lowest possible priority by default, so 
> users would have to edit every single .repo file by hand to give them higher 
> priorities than the backports repository. In other words, yes, special 
> tweaking of Yum would be required.

 There's:

http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum-utils.git;a=blob_plain;f=plugins/priorities/README;hb=90ea69cc7589160735fc67f341db210403bc7f6f

...but generally I don't recommend using priorities, as it's a big
hammer to solve a problem that shouldn't exist:

http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/ConflictingRepos

...or to put it another way, putting a new firefox and PostgreSQL in the
same repo. is a really bad idea.

> Another solution would be to simply have separate repositories – stored on the 
> same server and maintained by the same people, but with separately packaged 
> .repo files. If I can't wait to have the very latest Openoffice, I install the 
> fedora-backports-openoffice package which contains /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-
> backports-openoffice.repo, and then a simple "yum update" will upgrade all the 
> Openoffice packages. If I don't want sudden changes to PostgreSQL, then I 
> refrain from installing fedora-backports-postgresql. Mission accomplished.

 That's basically what we have now with repos.fedorapeople.org ... the
next thing from there is if we could trust those packages the same as
the ones from Fedora itself (and maybe get some mirroring). But that
will require a lot more resources.