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sameold
Asked: 2012-08-01 08:01:12 +0800 CST

What is the RPMRepository

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In several CentOS tutorials, they advise enabling the RPMRepository. I have some questions about this repository.

  1. It seems like it's a RedHat repository that CentOS uses as well, since it's based on RedHat. Is this correct.

  2. How do I read the content of this rpm i.e. what packages are inside this repository. I've downloaded one of the rpm files at http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/ and tried opening it in a text editor on windows, but it's not a text file. How do I know what list of packages I can get from this repository?

  3. Is this an essential repository? What I mean is: are the packages available from this repository unavailable in any other repository? They're only available from this repo?

  4. Are there other repositories that are of use for a system running CentOS?

centos

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    RPM Repositories are literally just indexes of available RPM packages, certainly RH have their own but there are others too (I use Oracle's for instance).

    As for listing what's in them you can just do a quick 'yum list' command, if you follow it with a wildcard it's only report those RPMs.

    Various repositories favour different objectives, some may be more security oriented, some more Dev related etc. If you're just starting then just use the defaults until they don't give you what you want. Google's a very good friend in this regard by the way.

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