On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 10:23 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > Though this is technically true, it's unhelpful to the naive user (and > we're all naive at some time or another). It would not be beyond > reason for Yum to know that certain repos work well with each other > and others don't, and to warn the user when conflicts might occur. A > plugin perhaps? The last few times I've added repos, I've always had to do manually. That involves going to the website for the repo, and getting a RPM or copying a configuration file to /etc, or reading instructions about doing this from some other website. I've seen warnings on those pages that some repos aren't compatible, and explicitly named them. That's probably the best place to list the problems. But then they can only warn about repos that they're aware of, or have tested. Sure, a setup RPM from Livna, for instance, could name the ATRPMS setup as a conflicting package, but that might raise the ire of some. A conflict wouldn't be a warning, but would abort setting things up, and perhaps some users are able to manage such conflicts themselves. But if it refuses to install, they're not able to do so. Fedora doesn't talk about certain repos for legal reasons discussed to death on here. So, you could hardly expect the Fedora supplied yum configuration files to specifically mention them, either. The last two points makes it rather hard to programatically avoid the problem. Yum can't really handle conflicts between repos, as requirements simply say the filenames that they depend on, not which repo the files come from. So an incompatible library.so from one repo, with a same-named library.so from another repo is going to be a problem. Really, the only solution is for repos not to produce incompatible packages, but I can't see that happening any time soon. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
