COPR: Fedora PPAs

Diolinux

Find out what they are and how to use Fedora copr repositories.

Everyone, or at least most of you who are reading this article, should already know what it is, or at least have heard about PPAs. To the “unsuspecting”, PPAs are software repositories for Ubuntu and its derivatives that can be created and maintained by anyone who has enough knowledge to do so.

In case you are still kind of “floating” on the subject of repositories, the video below will certainly make it very clear what it is about.

Now that you know what repositories are, let’s go to copr.

The acronym copr stands for “Cool Other Package Repo”, and in layman’s terms it is a platform on which any developer can create repositories to distribute their software so that they can be easily installed on any machine with Fedora installed.

The association with PPAs is inevitable, since the idea behind the service is quite similar, but in practice copr repositories are used for slightly different purposes than PPAs.

It is extremely common to find Internet programs that depend on PPAs to be installed on Ubuntu and derivatives. In the case of Fedora, most of the programs used by most users are present in the official repositories or in RPM Fusion, so that they can be installed directly from the system’s application store. In other cases, many developers choose to make the .rpm packages available, which can be installed similarly to the Debian / Ubuntu base .deb or Windows .exe.

In most cases, copr repositories are used for testing purposes, providing “bleeding edge” versions, betas or even alphas of software, such as the “che-mesa” repository that contains extremely updated versions of the Mesa Driver, on the which we speak in this article.

How to use?

All copr repositories can be found at official service website, and the installation proceeds as follows:

In the example below I will be activating the repository copr “che-table”, Using the user and repository names that can be found on the same page, as can be seen in the image below.

sudo dnf copr enable che/mesa
Finding username / repository in copr.

Ready! Now the next time you update your system, or install some software, the repository will be synchronized automatically.

To remove the repository, just use the same command, replacing “enable” with “remove”, as shown in the example below.

sudo dnf copr remove che/mesa

Finally, to remove all the software that had been installed from the newly removed repository, simply run the following command:

sudo dnf distro-sync

Note.: The repositories copr just like PPAs are repositories that can be created and maintained by anyone who has the necessary knowledge to do so. We at Diolinux and the team at Fedora cannot guarantee the safety or functioning of any copr. Use at your own risk!

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That’s all, folks! ?


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