preventing known-damaging third-party to fedora/epel package upgrade?

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Paul Wouters <pwouters at redhat.com> wrote:
> Therefore neither Fedora nor EPEL
> ever shipped 1.3.x, and we started out with 1.4.x.

<snip>

> So perhaps the best way would be to never allow the upgrade from 1.3.x
> to 1.4.x. Is there any kind of support for this?

I don't think so, and in general case it is probably impossible to
solve.  In this specific case 1.3 was available upstream, so "exclude
1.3->1.4 upgrades" sounds possible, but what if the same situation
reoccurs with, say, 2.1 and 2.2, when Fedora has packages for both 2.1
and 2.2?  We won't be able to solve it for the users in that case.
While solving it for the 1.3->1.4 case would undoubtedly be useful to
users right now, I don't think it's worth spending too much effort
when we can't make that a general promise.  Cross-repository (and
cross-packager) updates just can not be supported in full generality.
    Mirek