atrpms ate my pc

[Apologies for the foul language contained within this post - unless you are an atrpms developer in which case no apology is offered, the foul langauge is aimed squarely at you.]

I'm fucking hopping mad at atrpms. Nowhere[1] on their website does it say "installing packages from this repository will irreversibly fuck up your entire rpm setup" and yet that's exactly what has happened.

The atrpmers have seen fit to replace various key packages on my system with their own versions and if I ever want to remove them from my system I'm basically fucked. The most spectacular seems to be medley-package-config-103-1.rhfc4.at. This package appears to be the atrpms koolaid. I'm not sure why yum decided I needed this. I didn't request it, it came as part of a yum update. This package signed me up to about 10 new yum repos that I have no interest in (all with gpg signature checking turned off!) and is now listed as the owner of /etc/yum.conf. For this and various other reasons when I try to yum remove medley-package-config

it wants to uninistall 1029 other packages (I only have 1830 total) including zsh, bind, vixie-cron, up2date and a whole load of other stuff that should not depend on it. Perhaps most amazingly, it wants to uninstall yum!

This is unthinkably fucking moronic and begs the question, what ungodly prick thought that such an invasive, insecure, system raping package would actually be good idea and what gobshite decided to make other packages depend on it (and thus cause it to arrive on my system as part of a run-of-the-mill update).

I now have ahead of me, several hours of trying to untangle this mess and in the end I'll probably just have to reinstall. I suppose I must accept respsonibility for this. I wanted to make a mythtv box and the fedora mythtv install guide recommended getting the packages from atrpms. This worked and everything was fine for a day or two, until this. Balls.

Lesson learnt: just because a group of people are capable of mastering the complexities of packaging and distributing a wide range of software that doesn't mean that they aren't drooling fucktards hell-bent on shitting all over your machine.

After all the ranting I would like to thank Dag Wieers for maintaining a fantastic repository of packages and understanding the importance of not boning other people's setups. In the past he made reference to the fact that other repositories are not so careful, I didn't appreciate it at the time. Apparently all of the other RPMforge repositories follow similar don't-bone-the-user policies - good stuff guys.

[1] Maybe it does say this somewhere but it's not on the front page which is where it should be.