On 1/27/2010 5:03, Jaroslaw Polok wrote:
> Jim Green wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> I'm considering adding the EPEL repository
>>
>>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
>>
>> to a SL54 network of around 50 machines.  Do any of the SL users
>> here have any experience of EPEL, especially incompatibilities,
>> problems etc ...
>
> We do: For our SL version - SLC(ern) we actually add
> the EPEL repo by default to our installations:
> No problems seen so far and no incompatibilities/conflicts:
> But that is to be expected: EPEL policy is to add
> only supplementary packages without changing/updating
> what is provided by the system.
> (that's to say we also use protectbase yum plugin
> to make sure that our system repositories take
> precedence over all others .. just in case and because
> we ship some packages which are in EPEL too - for
> historical reasons mostly ...)
>
> So far few hundred users are running since few months
> with this configuration and we haven;t received any
> complaints/problem reports.

EPEL alone causes very few problems; one of their aims is to stay as
compatible as possible with the base system.  You might run across a small
number of minor things because SL is not completely compatible with CentOS
and friends, but in general that's just limited to things as minor as both
SL and EPEL providing alpine.  EPEL really only starts causing problems
when you decide to mix it with Dag/RPMForge as their packages can leapfrog
each other and break depsolving.

-- 
Garrett Holmstrom
University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy
Systems Staff