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?
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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.
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":
Available Repositories for CentOS - Known Problem Repositories