Hi

Thanks for explanations !

> 
>>Giving the unablity of yum to setup repository preference
> 
> 
> In fact there are ways to have yum do what you want, at least newer
> yum versions which allow plugins.

Right, as Troy mentioned in this thread the yum protectbase
plugin shall do there ... [there is still a small BUT there:
if somebody wants to use yumex ... that one disables ALL yum
plugins ... just 'discovered it ...]

> 
>>and at the same time importance of strict RHEL compatibility at
>>which many of Scientific Linux users aim ...
> 
> 
> Oh, ATrpms is strict RHEL4 compatible, I can guarantee that, including
> the packages being replaced. :)

Ooops, lack of precision after 2 weeks laziness , sorry,
Of course it is, what I'm (again potentially ;-)) afraid of
is that:

sbdy builds a package depending on libfoo.Y where libfoo.Y comes
from ATrpms (while original RHEL provides libfoo.X) ..
such package will not be compatible with plain RHEL anymore ..

[actually similar situation happened to us in the past when
I've rebuilt some RHEL srpms for SL while having updated
- for XFS - libattr/libacl on my built system .. resulted in
update problems for users ..]

> Potentially, but several years of ATrpms and even some more before
> ATrpms have shown that the typical issues are to be expected
> elsewhere. On the contrary, fixes in rpm, glibc and even openssh had
> been propagated in 3rd party repos before the vendor had time to fix
> them (or never did like for rpm).
> 
> Perhaps that's to be expected. Usually the packages that are replaced
> are already of higher maturity, so fixing or extending them invites
> less trouble than creating new packages from scratch.

I personally have no problem with that (and fully agree
that some problems really SHALL be fixed): but it would
be nice to make it clear to all repository users that
the repository contains packages replacing vendor ones
not only add-ons.

I believe that users think that aditional repositories
are just that: additional packages -
If I'm not mistaken ATrpms is the only one for RHEL/FC4
which provides more then just add-ons

Just my 2 (euro)cents ;-)

Cheers

Jarek

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