Bug 127346

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Description of problem:
Please add a new tag (info field) to the RPM packages, to be used as a
unique identifier for the package repository of origin for that
package. E.g.:

Repository: redhat

or

Repository: freshrpms

This would enable a much easier package management for tools such as
yum. See this discussion (the "sticky repositories" thread):

https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2004-July/thread.html#4737

Below i will just outline the main points; please read the thread
above which is more detailed.

Essentially, if rpm packages would carry a tag that's used to uniquely
identify the repository of origin for each package, this would
simplify package updates and make them more reliable and less
"surprising" for users. Case in point, add 3 or 4 repositories to
yum.conf then run "yum update" - the end result is a system that's
pretty far from the initial one and, even worse, the result is not
predictable entirely.

If packages could be uniquely tracked back to their repository of
origin, things like "sticky repositories" and selective updates
(update packages using only updates from the same repo) would be
trivial to implement.

Also, users would be able to run commands such as:

yum repo-name install package-name

or

yum repo-name update package-name
(to manually override repository "stickyness")

On top of that, this would make package management apps such as yum a
lot more easy to integrate with RPM repositories search engines. It
would be just a matter of adding a lot of repos to yum.conf then do a
search; the search results will contain, among other things, the repo
unique ID, so yum would know unambiguously which repo to use to
download a specific package.

In my opinion, this is a must-have feature if multiple RPM
repositories are to peacefully coexist. RPM not supporting this
feature is not just unfriendly to the idea of multiple repositories
coexisting with the official Fedora distribution, but downright hostile.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rpm-4.3.1-0.3

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.see above
2.
3.
    

Actual Results:  see above

Expected Results:  see above

Additional info: