Installing Fedora RPMs in CentOS

Solution 1:

I recommend to use Fedora EPEL instead:

"Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. Fedora is the upstream of RHEL and add-on packages for EPEL are sourced from the Fedora repository primarily and built against RHEL."

The binary RPMs of the latest Fedora release are built against much newer libraries and are therefore often not compatible with the older libraries of CentOS. If you want to try Fedora RPMs anyway (and if there is no EPEL alternative) I would get the Fedora Source RPM and try to recompile on CentOS (but often is will be difficult because of dependencies).

Solution 2:

It's generally better to stay clear, and I don't think that answer will surprise you. Fedora RPM's can have dependencies on versions of software that do not exist on CentOS. For example, the Python 2.6 ABI is not available on CentOS - no matter what version - but is the default on Fedora.

Apart from this, it is also very possible that Fedora RPM's will use macros in RPM pre- and postscripts that are unavailable on CentOS or try to do stuff in those scripts that is not possible on CentOS.

That said, it is not impossible to use Fedora RPM's on CentOS. You might just be lucky. :-)

What is probably safer, is to rebuild the Fedora source RPM's on your CentOS machine: if the RPM's will build on the CentOS machine, my guess would be that you would be pretty safe. Of course, the RPM's then have become normal CentOS RPM's and not Fedora RPM's anymore...