Re: New to CentOS, and wondering about application availability

[oconnell at soe.ucsd.edu (Sean O'Connell)]

On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:58 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> Bryan,
> 
>     I hope my comments about information gathering were not taken 
> personally. I did not mean to be accusatory or anything. I appreciate 
> the advice you were giving, and merely offering an opinion how maybe 
> your wealth of knowledge could be made more accessible to a newbie such 
> as myself.
> 
> >Something else is using the RPM database.
> >It's just preventing multiple write access.
> >Do you have up2date running?
> >  
> >
> Yes, that turned out to be the case. Thanks for suggesting this. The 
> up2date icon was indicating something needed to be downloaded. So I went 
> through the up2date process and completed it, and then re-ran the public 
> key install, and it worked. I now have also successfully installed Xine.
> 
> Okay, now I'm over that obstacle, now I am curious. Why did Fedora seem 
> to be able to install things through yum immediately after install, and 
> CentOS had to do this key installation stuff?

Dave-

I think the issue stems from the content of the /etc/yum.conf
and /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo. I am guessing that either the
Fedora was setup with gpgcheck=0 out of the box (I overwrite the stock
yum.conf, so I haven't looked at in a while), or the yum server stanzas
include the following bit of magic

gpgkey=http://<servername>/path/to/GPG-KEY

You can add this and if you do a yum -y update, yum will slurp the key
into the rpmdb. It's a very nice feature. One thing is that it was added
to yum at a particular version, and some of the centos versions of yum
may predate it. From man yum.conf

gpgkey A URL pointing to the ASCII-armoured GPG key file for the repository. This option is used if yum  needs
       a  public  key  to verify a package and the required key hasn?t been imported into the RPM database. If
       this option is set, yum will automatically import the key from the specified URL. You will be  prompted
       before the key is installed unless the assumeyes option is set.

-- 
Sean