[ale] CentOS versions increase but package versions kept the same?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 16:32 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
>   This isn't a problem in the Gentoo-land in which I dwell but in 
> CentOS, how do people deal with a situation where an app
> implementation depends on specific versions of some number of packages
> - say, five packages at the versions included with 4.6 but one wants
> to keep those same five packages at those same versions but in CentOS
> 5.5?
> 
> Is this CentOS "crazy talk?"  In Gentoo's Portage, you'd just tell 
> Portage where to hold those packages' versions and you could just go 
> blithely updating other packages in your otherwise versionless Linux 
> system indefinitely.  But it seems to me that if you care anything
> about your application, you'd want to give it a platform refresh every
> once in a while.  What I'm asking about is a platform refresh but not
> for those parts of the platform that matter the most - the app's first
> layer of dependencies. 

Well, the first thing's first: are those dependencies of your
application something that is depended on by any other installed
package?  If so, versioned dependencies might work against you here, and
you might have to just build custom packages for your application to
depend on separately, with a configuration and/or installation location
that doesn't clobber where the operating system is going to hold things.

If that's not an issue for you, then the only thing left is to figure
out if there is some sort of hold/pinning system.  I can't seem to find
any information on that in the Fedora RPM Guide searching through it for
the words "hold" or "pin"... it is possible that you need to look at
whatever it is that sits on top of RPM, as that might not be
functionality that the core package management utility has itself; as I
understand it, implementations using RPM on modern systems actually have
multiple levels of package management, with the actual RPM software
being the lowest tier.  I don't know enough about the system as a whole
to figure out how to do useful things with it...

	--- Mike