Yet another frustration with Fedora package management

[Radek Holy]

----- Original Message -----

> From: "Hedayat Vatankhah" <hedayat.fwd at gmail.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora"
> <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 3, 2015 9:42:01 PM
> Subject: Yet another frustration with Fedora package management

> 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).

Hi, I understand the frustration. On the other hand, I personally hate anything that is centralized. Just an idea: what about a simple modular tool (maybe installed by default) which would be able to set options like this at all the places? Potentially it could be able to synchronize a subset of settings between given programs. 
-- 
Radek Holý 
Associate Software Engineer 
Software Management Team 
Red Hat Czech 
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