Yet another frustration with Fedora package management

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

/*Radek Holy <rholy at redhat.com>*/ wrote on Mon, 5 Jan 2015 03:03:30 
-0500 (EST):
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>     *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.
While I prefer the centralized approach (and also consider your approach 
still a centralized one), but whatever works is fine with me.


> -- 
> Radek Holý
> Associate Software Engineer
> Software Management Team
> Red Hat Czech
>

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