Some people using CentOS 5 with RPMForge may have bumped into a problem where perl-Compress-Zlib from CentOS is upgraded with the same package from RPMForge. What happened? The original priorities plugin excluded packages just by their names. So, even if a higher priority repo has a package for one arch (say i386) and a lower priority repo has a package with the same name but a different arch (e.g. noarch), the package from the repository with the lower priority was excluded.

One user reported a more exotic usage case (rhbz #227540), where he needed per arch priorities, where for instance, a x86_64 package does not exclude a i386 package with a lower priority. Upstream (yum-utils) made a change to make priorities per-arch. Unfortunately, this has hit us now that perl-Compress-Zlib has become a noarch package, meaning that it will not be excluded, and that yum offers to upgrade the package with the package from RPMForge.

This has now been fixed in the HEAD git version of yum-priorities, where per-arch excludes are made optional rather than the default. After proper testing, we will probably include this version of priorities in CentOS 5-Extras (CentOS 4 is not affected).

I'd like to post a slight reaction to Dag's recent blog entry as well: my experiences are quite the contrary. yum is one of the nicest package managers I have found, the code is very readable, it's easy to write plugins for yum, it's easy to embed yum in other software. Sure, there are some problematic things (like signal handling in some yum versions), but the yum developers have been very responsive to my bug reports and patches.