On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 01:29:48PM -0600, Adam Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 01:15:15PM -0600, Ken Teh wrote:
> > Quick question?
> > 
> > I needed some packages from epel so I added the epel rpms from SL6x.  Is
> > it okay to leave the yum.repos.d/epel.repo enabled?  Are there packages
> > on epel that will clobber the SL6x packages during the nightly updates?
> > 
> > Thanks!
> 
> The policy on EPEL packages and updates are to not clobber anything
> shipped by Red Hat in RHEL proper (including the optional channels in RHN)
> so pending what all from RHEL is put together to make SL I would imagine
> its quite safe. I personally run EPEL on my RHEL, SL, and CentOS machines
> and to date have not run into a package clobber issue (though I have a
> number of times with third party repos that aren't EPEL). That is not to
> say it won't ever happen, but I've never personally found an instance in
> which it did and the EPEL folks do make an effort to keep it from
> happening. I personally think its pretty safe, but YMMV.
> 
> -AdamM

I would second Adam's comments.  Plus, if you are installing some packages
from EPEL, you will probably want to leave it enabled so that those packages
are kept up to date as well.

If you want to verify the effects of enabling EPEL (or any other 3rd party
repo, for that matter), just enable it, and then manually run "yum update". 
It will print out the list of updates it proposes to apply, along with the
repo each package is from.  You can read through the list to see if it looks
like anything from the 3rd party repo is going to update a package from the
core repos, and if you're not comfortable with anything, just answer "N" to
the prompt and disable the repo again.

cheers,
- Paul

-- 
Paul Stauffer <[log in to unmask]>
Manager of Systems Administration
Computer Science Department
Boston University