As payment for my many sins, I have been forced to work with Centos and Yum recently. For development this is a fantastically sub-optimal combination with Centos repositories being years out of date and Yum being a slight pain. In addition I’m working in a heavily proxy’d environment.

Most of my problems are a result of my ignorance, so I’ll stop moaning and document what I’ve learnt

Global Proxies and Yum

Yum has a habit of ignoring proxy settings, it has two command options that can help

• –httpproxy
• –httpport

e.g.

yum --httpproxy myproxy.co... --httpport  80 ...

Git on Centos

Webtatic has great support for later versions of GIT.

I had to combine the command listed on the site with the yum proxy commands above, something like

rpm -ivh http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/centos/5/`uname -i`/webtatic-release-5-1.noarch.rpm  --httpproxy myproxy.co... --httpport  80

When installing git-all one package seemed to not be signed, so I installed this first skipping the signing (this isn’t a great idea, but I am working in a VM in my defence).

 yum install --nogpgcheck --enablerepo=webtatic subverion-perl

Then I installed the rest as normal

yum install --enablerepo=webtatic git-all

RVM, Centos and Packages

RVM has a solution to Centos package yuk, install its own. Currently it has documentation and support for these, for example readline

Libxml2 Libxslt

Centos has sucky versions of these, which doesn’t please nokogiri. So I downloaded the latest versions and compiled them as described here