I was faced with the challenging question of whether or not to use dag/RPMForge or ATrpms today.  I had some struggles dealing with both, but made my final decision based on flexibility.

I had a client's machine that had a few RPM's from ATrpms installed on it.  I needed to install the devel version of that particular RPM.  The issue was that I was on a RHEL4 machine and apparently the RPMs that were installed were manualliy installed and not done so by up2date or yum.  I went to run up2date on the devel version of the RPM I needed installed and up2date knew nothing of the ATrpms repository.  I then decided to try yum -- it wasn't even installed.

I then decided to go out to ATrpms and install the devel version of the RPM manually only to find that that particular version of the package was down-rev and it was no longer available from their site!  UGGGG!   I tried getting the repo setup with up2date (since yum wasn't installed nor were any of the dependencies), but apparently the ATrpms repo doesn't support up2date.  GRRR!!!

The end solution was to remove all the ATrpms RPM's that were conflicting, add the RPMforge repo to the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file and use up2date to install everything I needed.

dat/RPMForge supports up2date, preserves previous versions of packages, and (to me) seems to be more in-tune with the RHEL mentality of stability of functionality with it's package maintenance.