Configure YUM to exclude package upgrades

Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.

And many times its required that when you run the system/package updates you don't want to upgrade certain package and for this just add an exclude line to the end of your [main] section in /etc/yum.conf, and you are done. Your yum.conf should look something like this:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
exclude=gdm  grub

This will prevent upgrades of the gdm and grub.  The list of apps in the exclude should be space sepeated.  Shell wildcards ( * ? ) can also be included.