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MGP
Asked: 2014-01-09 06:00:37 +0800 CST

What is the deal with Centos repos? How many?

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I am a long time Debian user, now at work have to manage several Centos machines, but I'm used to 1,2 or at most 3 repos on Debian, the centos repo file is full of links, and I dare to say they aren't all that necessary, after reading this page on Centos wiki I have even more questions.

Currently the repos used are these: 

[os]
[updates]
[extras]
[elrepo]
[atrpms-stable]
[rpmforge]
[CentOSplus]
[fasttrack]
[remi]
[epel]
[Postgresql9.2]
[sogo]

So, what would be the recommended repos for a basic Centos system, I will be using/deploying php, python, nginx, apache, ftp, etc.. headless severs system of course, no need for codecs or gui stuff.

centos

2 Answers

  1. These days, I'd recommend the stock CentOS-Base repository as well as the EPEL repository for additional packages. That covers 95% of my needs. Sometimes I'll need packages from RepoForge (RPM Forge).

    They can all coexist in recent versions of CentOS.

    CentOS-Plus is not necessary unless you need it... and you'll know.

    Avoid poorly-maintained repos. I rarely have a reason to go outside of the two additional repositories I listed above.

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  2. Best Answer

    Keep it to the absolute minimum where your server still operates, if possible only the official CentOS repos (os, updates, extras, fasttrack).

    These repos are guaranteed to be stable as long as the OS is maintained.

    The drawback is that these official repos only offer limited functionality and sometimes too old versions (PHP is a typical issue there). This is very different from the huge package selection that Debian users are used to, but makes it possible to offer long support cycles for these products.

    All other repos will offer additional and/or newer packages than the standard and are preferred to use instead of compiling stuff yourself, but since they are 3rd party offerings, they might get discontinued at any time or be just neglected (e.g. remi is handled by just one guy, called Remi...!), so you need to be careful and watch these and might end up in an unfortunate situation if a repo indeed gets discontinued.

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