On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 13:41, seth vidal wrote: > On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 16:39, Florin Andrei wrote: > > I would like to configure yum so that it will only update packages with > > updates from their own repositories of origin. > > E.g., if i'm using a package from the official Fedora distribution, "yum > > update" should only update it with the official Fedora updates. But if i > > manually update that package to a newer version from another repository, > > yum should track only that particular repository for updates for that > > package. > > > > Essentially, that could be defined as "sticky repositories". > > > > Is that currently achievable with yum? > > no and tracking an installed package back to it's repository of origin > is going to be prone to failure. Hm, then this is a rather serious usability problem with yum. Suppose i need a package that's not in the official Fedora distribution. I find a repo which carries it. I add the repo to yum.conf. I run "yum install blah". I leave the repo in yum.conf uncommented. A week later i do a "yum install". Lo and behold, all of a sudden all packages from that newer repo which have a version number newer than the corresponding ones in the official Fedora distro will get downloaded and installed. Sometimes this is good (but very rarely), but more often this could wreak havoc to my system (it did happen). Currently, i have to add a repo to yum.conf, do a "yum install blah", then comment the repo out. I always have to play this comment in / comment out game every time i use a repo, otherwise i forget about the repos and the first "yum update" will make my system unrecognizable. Suppose i installed a few packages from a repo, and i just want to update those packages, using newer versions from that same repo? Again, this is currently impossible to achieve with yum unless one plays this yum.conf editing game, which is rather tedious. Simply updating those packages to whatever's newest in all repos is not ok, since different repos package things in different ways, etc. But that's common knowledge, no need to insist. Think from a user's perspective - it simply does not make sense to do so many low-level operations (editing yum.conf) when the whole purpose of yum is to make package management easier. At present, yum simply does not seem fit for a world where multiple repositories compete to offer custom packages for the distributions. Also, "sticky repositories" will offer The Definitive Solution to the otherwise untractable problem of repository priority (in yum.conf files with multiple repos). I suspect i understand why you say that sticky repos cannot be reliably implemented - it's because of the difficulty of identifying the repo based on version number, correct? Well then, perhaps that's something that needs to be addressed by rpm? Like a new flag to the rpm packages, carrying an identifier which is unique to each repo? -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org
