I recently submitted a Puppet patch which would have enabled the EPEL repository on a number of our CentOS 7 systems (I need this in order to install Python 3).
One of the sysadmins rejected the patch, claiming that EPEL is not safe, and can conflict with the base repository packages. I was told that EPEL can make determining "which package will be available on which node somewhat unpredictable."
I am a software developer now, but I was a full-time sysadmin from 1995 to 2013. I have never heard about this kind of conflict before, and asking a few friends about it, none of them have either.
So my question is: can EPEL conflict with the stock/base CentOS 7 repositories? Is there any documentation out there of this happening? I didn't find anything when searching online, except a couple of statements indicating exactly the opposite.
Does EPEL replace packages provided within Red Hat Enterprise Linux or layered products?
