Centos – yum equivalent of “apt-get purge”

Alright I fixed it. The config files where bound to another package (proftpd-basic).

So using the following commands fixed the problems:

apt-get purge proftp*
apt-get install proftpd

yum update originally just did upgrades of packages to new versions. If, for example, foo-awesome obsoleted foo, yum update wouldn't offer to upgrade from foo to foo-awesome. Adding the --obsoletes flag to yum update made it do the extra checks to also offer that upgrade path. yum upgrade was added as (essentially) an alias for yum --obsoletes update. Since this is the behavior that almost everyone wants all of the time, the configuration option obsoletes=1 was added to the default /etc/yum.conf, making yum update and yum upgrade equivalent on any recent, stock, Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/etc.

If you want to avoid kernel updates when you're running yum update, you can just do yum --exclude=kernel* update. If you want automatic updates on, but you want to avoid automatic kernel upgrades, then adding the exclude to yum.conf is probably the right answer.

There probably isn't a Right Answer for your question. RHEL and RHEL-based distributions don't have the same philosophy as the Debian developers when it comes to updates, so the tools don't encourage the same sorts of behavior.