Third party packages and modules in CentOS 8

In CentOS 8, modules were introduced. These are intended to allow users to select between multiple versions of a package - but the implementation of this has introduced some complexities for third party packages.

In CentOS 8, if a package is provided by a module - even if that module is disabled - it will take priority over a non-module package. This means that if module foobar:1.0 provides package foo, you won't be able to install a package named foo from anywhere else.

The only workaround for this is to edit the configuration for the third party repo which will be named something like /etc/yum.repos.d/myrepo.repo and add the following line:

module_hotfixes=true

After this you should be able to install packages from the third party repo as usual.