[Novalug] Fedora Repos

Peter Larsen plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com
Mon Nov 14 13:24:35 EST 2011


On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 10:45 -0500, greg pryzby wrote: 
> Safe? as safe as any non-official Fedora repo. The owner knows the
> rule and should play by them. NVidia, Adobe, Google, and others offer
> repos to play nice.
> 
> The question is more 'free vs non-free' than 'safe'. If the packages
> are signed and you install the key, it is 'safe' from bad hackers (or
> should be).

While I rarely find occasions where I disagree with Greg - this is
probably one of them. Safe may be the wrong word - but there are risks
involved. Independent repos can overlap and conflict. They're not tested
at the same time, so at any point in time you may be the first to get a
certain combination down and things will not work. Other risks that
libraries being updated by the 3rd party repo overrides a tested version
and causes other packages unrelated not to work, or your update fails
because of the version dependency.

3rd party repos needs to be used with care. Let me point out that I do
run with quite a few of them myself. There is of course the free vs.
non-free question but in many cases, it's either a license issue or
about certain products not following Fedora standards and haven't been
adopted into the official repos. 

This is an important point - it's not really hard to get into the Fedora
repo. You need a sponsor of a project, and the project needs to follow
certain guidelines. It also has to use the right license terms GPLv2 I
think is minimum requirement these days. Most FOSS projects are already
at that level - and the hardest part is getting a sponsor, someone
who'll be in charge of keeping the project up to date on Fedora. Bottom
line, if a project is not part of Fedora's official repos you need to
stop and think. 

There are a few other plugins that will benefit you when you mix and
match repos. One is called yum-plugin-priorities. This allows "fedora"
to win, if there are conflicts. It can prevent bad replacement of key
Fedora parts. Another is yum-plugin-protectbase.

I'm not saying do not use alternative repos. I'm saying use them with
great consideration. The golden rule I would follow if Fedora is new to
me, is use only repos that are being mentioned at the official fedora
site. RPMFusion is mentioned and as long as you just use the components
being talked about on FedoraFAQ (etc) you should be fine. But do be
aware that things _can_ break when you use less official sources with
Fedora.

> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Mark A. Metz <mametz@aol.com> wrote:
> > That's considered a "safe" repo?
> >
> >
> > On 11/13/2011 06:04 PM, greg pryzby wrote:
> >>
> >> Nope... there is a repo ;)
> >>
> >>
> >> http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-google-chrome-with-yum-on-fedora-red-hat-rhel/
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Mark A. Metz<mametz@aol.com>  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> <Ctrl>c was the magic bullet.  I had to hit<Ctrl>c every time I tried to
> >>> install something otherwise the download was amazingly slow.  Once I hit
> >>> <Ctrl>c, whoosh!
> >>>
> >>> Inkscape is on, Blender is on (not to most recent release, though),
> >>> Thunderbird is on.  I would still like to run Chrome rather than FireFox
> >>> so
> >>> I may have to tread lightly back into the non-repo world.
> >>>
> >>> No more problems with Evolution because I'm using Thunderbird now.  It
> >>> just
> >>> works out of the box!
> >>>
> >>> Now I'll figure out how to add app icons to the menu bar on the left.
> >>>  Then
> >>> I'll look at the nVidia drivers from Peter's link.
> >>>
> >>> I have work to do, but tinkering with a new machine is more fun than
> >>> writing
> >>> a report.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On 11/13/2011 03:47 PM, greg pryzby wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Mark A. Metz<mametz@aol.com>    wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Okay, so maybe the Fedora server has a problem.
> >>>>
> >>>> stop and restart. I almost always install from terminal vs gui
> >>>>    sudo yum search appname
> >>>>    sudo yum install appname
> >>>>
> >>>> daily I run
> >>>>    sudo yum upgrade
> >>>>
> >>>> If things are slow downloading, I<Ctrl>C and run again.
> >>>>
> >>>>> I came home and tried to use the Add/Remove software again for Inkscape
> >>>>> and it "failed."  So I typed "yum install inkscape" in terminal so I
> >>>>> could see what's happening.  The downloads are crawling.
> >>>>
> >>>> Is the download slow? If so stop and restart so it gets a different
> >>>> server to pull the packages.
> >>>>
> >>>>> While the yum install was going on, I went to the Inkscape site with
> >>>>> FireFox and downloaded the .tar.  It took less than 10 seconds.
> >>>>> (26.3MB).  The yum install for Inkscape has been going for over 20
> >>>>> minutes  now (42 packages, total size 20M) and it's only on the 4th
> >>>>> package!
> >>>>
> >>>> It could be an issue w/ the server you are pulling from. It could be
> >>>> running an selinux update and relabeling the filesystem. Hard to say
> >>>> w/o the details pasted.
> >>>>
> >>>>> I can't get Evolution to send via my AOL smtp server either, using the
> >>>>> same settings in ThunderBird on my desktop machine.
> >>>>
> >>>> Not sure what is up there without specifics.
> >>>>
> >>>> This might help
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>  http://www.webtlk.com/2011/03/17/quick-guide-to-set-aol-smtp-and-pop-settings/
> >>>>
> >>>>> Fun, fun, fun!
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
"I went into a general store, and they wouldn't sell me anything specific".
		-- Steven Wright
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