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So everyone who uses CentOS knows the default repositories have their limits. I've been using rpmforge for years as a secondary repo. I usually use yum priorities to make sure rpmforge never installs something the base repo can take care of. Recently I came across a need to install EPEL as a tertiary repo. Is EPEL kept more up to date than rpmforge or in any way better? Should I be using that instead of rpmforge?

CarpeNoctem
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    Every time you ask this question, a penguin dies. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Dec 04 '10 at 06:32
  • Anyone who has used RH distros for any extended period of time knows you end adding additional repositories. Hopefully you add these in leu of dropping pkgs into a local repo only to watch them go stale. I would highly recommend where possible that people look into using Ubuntu for the sake of package sanity. It's rare as all hell to be missing a mainstream package from the default repos. When it does occur there's almost always an alternative repo. The need to manage an internal repo is avoided in almost all cases. – CarpeNoctem Sep 27 '14 at 23:09

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My understanding is that EPEL is more for hardware based packages, like graphics drivers, and rpmforge is for those "other" packages that might be popular in the linux community, but not a part of CentOS's default repos, like htop.

I do think, however, that rpmforge has recently changed the way their repos are managed to where the default repo enabled doesn't have packages that would conflict with the CentOS repos, supposedly negating the need for yum-priorities, but I haven't seen much documentation on this. I think EPEL does this too.

churnd
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It's been a while since this question was asked, but it looks like EPEL is now preferred to RPMForge, at least by the CentOS community. You can see here that EPEL is listed under "Community Approved Repositories":

Available Repositories for CentOS - Community Approved Repositories

While RPMForge is listed under "Known Problem Repositories":

RPMForge/RepoForge - Although once recommended, this repository is no longer maintained, and is not advised.

Available Repositories for CentOS - Known Problem Repositories

bmaupin
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  • Truth. I now use EPEL in combination with some of the project specific repositories, e.g. epel, percona, etc. What's nice is that there is very little overlap in package names so yum-priorities is not the necessity it once was. Additionally, there are now the SCL repositories for common software like ruby, python, and the like. – CarpeNoctem Sep 27 '14 at 23:05