FC4 Repositories

Brian Mury b.mury at ieee.org
Thu Jun 9 21:22:18 UTC 2005


On Thu, 2005-09-06 at 16:45 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 05:28:30PM -0300, Brian Mury wrote:
> > I do the same with smartpm. There is occasionally one minor problem:
> > up2date always looks for the latest version of any package, whereas
> > smartpm looks for the best version. Sometimes a third party repository
> 
> For some computer-generated version of "best", of course.

Computer-generated based on what the human operator has instructed the
computer to do. That is what computers do.

smartpm does a much better job of doing what I want than up2date or yum
ever have.

> > Fortunately the up2date alert icon can be told
> > to ignore specific packages.
>
> Yes, handy for keeping security flaws around without getting those pesky
> fixes.

As I said, I am only using the up2date alert icon to indicate when there
are new updates. I use smartpm to do the updating. Just because I have
told up2date to ignore a certain package doesn't mean it won't be
updated.

Some of the third party repos have packages that are identical to those
on the official repos - same version and everything - but tack on their
own version number at the end. So if the application is at version
1.2.3, and the official repos call it 1.2.3, then some 3rd party repo or
other is going to call it 1.2.3-1 or 1.2.3.1 so that up2date gets it
instead of the version from the official repos. This isn't usually a
problem, but sometimes other packages that are installed will not work
with the third party package. Up2date will grab the third party package
and break my other apps. Smartpm will still upgrade to 1.2.4 when it
becomes available, but it won't replace 1.2.3 with another version of
1.2.3 that breaks my system.

I also have experienced unexpected behaviour caused by jumping from one
repo to another (whichever has the newest version at the moment) for the
same package in the case where different repos have different
configurations or build options for the same package.

I prefer to stick to the official repos when possible, and use the third
party repos for packages that aren't available from the official repos.





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