Centos piority warning - 66 packages excluded due to repository priority protections

Question

If I add priority=1 to [updates] in CentOS-Base.repo
when I run "sudo yum update" I get the warning 66 packages excluded due to repository priority protections

This does not seem to have any adverse effect, but what exactly does it mean?

Answer 1

See http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities ( take a close look at section 5 )

Generally all active repo's in Base would be given the same priority. If you have only added a setting of 1 for updates then all other repos will have a priority of 99 (lower).

Comments

I had actually read this section, but evidently do not understand it. I take it the 66 packages mentioned are in "unofficial" repositories, in my case rpmforge.repo.rpmnew ?

Answer 2

If you have a repo called something.repo.rpmnew, it will be ignored. You would have to rename it to something.repo.

To oversimplify, say that you have rpmforge, base, and epel repos. Say that all of them have versions of perl. However, these versions may conflict with each other and break things.

So, if you gave base and updates priority of 1, then the others, even if they have a later version of perl, won't install it. The downside is that you're running the older version. The upside is that you don't risk this newer version of perl breaking some other package that you'd forgotten.

There are disadvantages--as the wiki page in question mentions, the late Seth Vidal disliked it.