Yum Manually and multiple repos

Quick post (I hope) about something I learned today that has a bit of a Captain Obvious taste to it. But I thought some people might find that amusing... even if it is at my expense.

Like many who use Red Hat products (CentOS comes to mind) and derived distros, I use repos outside the official ones. Because those repos tend to have newer versions of some packages, I try to be careful about only upgrading the packages that are required by the package I added said repo to my list. Short answer is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Long version is that I expect that people building the official packages being quite careful about compatibility and security. So, I should only reach out to the different repos after I found out the official packages do not do what I need.

What I have been doing, and I do not claim it is the best solution, is to install and then disable the non-official repos so if I want something from them I have to specifically ask for it. So, if I want to use the remi repo, I would first disable it

sed -i -e 's/^enabled=1/enabled=0/' /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

and then specifically ask for it to install, say, php

yum install php --enablerepo=remi

which would install the latest PHP version that remi has. On a side note, if you had to install php 5.6 from remi, you would use remi-php56. But, what about upgrading them? After all, yum check-update and yum update by default will not check the disabled repos even if you have packages installed from them. So, you have to use --enablerepo. Now, what I learned today is that you can just list all the repos you are using by separating them with commas.

Let me show you in action: at first we think there are no updates:

raub@pickles ~]$ sudo yum check-update
Loaded plugins: product-id, rhnplugin, search-disabled-repos, subscription-
              : manager
This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or Red Hat Satellite.
[raub@pickles ~]$

Now, let's list all the repos we have been using with this machine and see what it tells us:

raub@pickles ~]$ sudo yum check-update --enablerepo=remi-php56,epel,secu
rity_shibboleth
Loaded plugins: product-id, rhnplugin, search-disabled-repos, subscription-
              : manager
This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or Red Hat Satellite.
security_shibboleth                                      | 1.2 kB     00:00
security_shibboleth/primary                                |  15 kB   00:00
security_shibboleth                                                       96/96

libcurl-openssl.x86_64                7.51.0-2.1             security_shibboleth
opensaml-schemas.x86_64               2.6.0-1.1              security_shibboleth
shibboleth.x86_64                     2.6.0-2.1              security_shibboleth
xmltooling-schemas.x86_64             1.6.0-1.1              security_shibboleth
[raub@pickles ~]$

As you can see, we do need to update shibboleth and its dependencies! And update we shall:

[raub@pickles ~]$ sudo yum update --enablerepo=remi-php56,epel,security_shibboleth
[...]
[raub@pickles ~]$ 

Kinda neat, eh?