Some older Artifactory versions cannot be installed via yum, after upgrading to 4.x because Artifactory 4.x marks versions =>3.6 as obsolete. This disables your ability to install specific versions of artifactory in the later 3.x range.
To reproduce:
put artifactory-4 into a yum repo along with 3.9.2
yum install artifactory-3.9.2 forces artifactory 4.0 to install.
The easy solution would be to remove the obsoletes, however this will require people to manually uninstall artifactory before installing artifactory 4. The obsoletes property causes this to happen automatically which is a better behavior under most circumstances.
Our developers have reviewed this behavior (RTFACT-7871) and have decided not to change it for the following reason:
Specifying a package obsoleting another makes installing the package much easier.
This problem will only happen with sites that are running both 3.x and 4.x which almost always means production and development versions. So, it's not unreasonable to expect separate yum repositories.
Artifactory did not play well with yum before 4.0.
Given all of these things we're going to stick with the obsoletes.
Thank you for understanding, and please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.