On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 05:03:19AM +0000, Michael A. Peters wrote: > I agree. > I think rpm and/or repo software should alert a user when a package
> installed from one source is cued to be replace by another.
It's gotta be able to work non-interactively.
simple. Have a priority list that yum (optionally) looks at.
[fedora-updates] [base] [freshrpms] [dag] [livna-stable] [JoesCoolPackages]
If an available package is in fedora-updates and in JoesCoolPackages - yum sees that fedora-updates is higher on list, so it takes priority regardless of the epoch/version/release in JoesCoolPackages.
If you ask for a package from dag that has a requirement fulfilled in both dag and freshrpms, it sees that freshrpms is higher in your list than dag so it grabs the dependency from freshrpms.
-=-
Another thing - I hate beuracracy but this may be needed - a neutral naming authority. In cases where packages conflict simply because of different package name, if the naming can't be fixed between the repos themselves, let an independent community group decide.
Naming conflicts SHOULD be rare because usually an rpm should bear the name of the source (or binary in case of things like divx4linux) tarball. One exception is things like plugins. I package the libvisual plugin for xmms - tarball name is libvisual-xmms but xmms plugins are always xmms-package so I rename it to xmms-libvisual. I think that is pretty easy for repo maintainers to figure out, and is common practice.
But dag is 100% right that there should be better cooperation resolving those kinds of issues, one of the main benefits of open source imho is choice, and choice should include who packages your extras.
