Yet another frustration with Fedora package management

Hedayat Vatankhah hedayat.fwd at gmail.com
Sat Jan 3 20:42:01 UTC 2015


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/, because these are the only common settings between 
all three (yum/dnf/PackageKit). TBH, I'm not sure about PackageKit, but 
I feel that it don't read /etc/dnf/dnf.conf as it doesn't use DNF but 
its backends. This is fine if the package is in a single known 
repository, but what if it is in 3 repositories that you might not be 
aware of all of them?

More details:
As you might already know, nvidia drivers in RPMFusion F21 repositories 
doesn't work for all nvidia cards. In one system, I finally installed 
akmod-nvidia from RPMFusion F20 repositories which worked fine. Soon 
after I realized that I should exclude akmod-nvidia and dependencies 
from F21 repositories. I added "exclude=*nvidia*" to /etc/yum.conf as I 
was lazy to check which repository these packages come from. But then I 
noticed that dnf doesn't consider it excluded. Then I thought that 
probably PackageKit doesn't use dnf.conf too. So, how should I excluded 
these packages? Well, these were in rpmfusion-nonfree-updates 
repository, so I added the exclude directive there. Then I found that I 
should add it to rpmfusion-nonfree repository too. However, since I use 
yum-plugin-local I also have a local repository (I actually copied the 
repository from another system, so it was enabled on this system so that 
I could install software from it) which also included these packages. 
Therefore, I should exclude "*nvidia*" in 3 repository configuration 
files to make sure (hopefully!) that these will not be installed by any 
package manager I know.

Suggestion: Please add a single configuration file to configure common 
package manager options (Specially between DNF and PackageKit, which are 
there to stay). As I mentioned in "F21 downloads repository metadata in 
3 places!" thread, Fedora package management should be consistent and 
integrated; and the current situation is really frustrating. If I want 
to exclude some packages, I should be able to do it once for all. If I 
want to disable automatic download of metadata/packages, there should be 
a single place where I can define my desired package management policy. 
If I want to specify default metadata_expire timeout for all 
repositories, there should be one place to do it. There really should be 
a single package management policy that must be respected by every 
package manager in Fedora, specially the main ones: DNF and PackageKit 
(and currently Yum).

Regards,
Hedayat
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