On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 2:53 PM Troy Dawson <tdawson(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Someone brought this proposal to me, I'd like to get others
feedback.
Proposal:
EPEL would make its own "devel" repo, with the missing RHEL packages,
grabbing the packages from the publicly available centos stream koji
builds.[1] For example, the missing lmdb-devel would be downloaded from
here.[2]
We would have a list of missing packages, along with their corresponding
source rpm name. Whenever that source rpm get's updated in RHEL, we would
grab the updated missing packages, and regenerate the "devel" repo.
This should work for epel8, epel8-next, epel9, epel9-next
I realize that this will require some up front work, but I'd like to get
people's ideas about the proposal.
Troy
[1] -
https://koji.mbox.centos.org/koji/
[2] -
https://koji.mbox.centos.org/pkgs/packages/lmdb/0.9.24/1.el8/x86_64/lmdb-...
Thanks to everyone for the discussion both on email and during our
committee meeting.
In the end this was deemed infeasible.
The biggest problem dealt with updates that get released in RHEL, but the
release in Stream has a different NVR. It could be that rhel ships
foo-1-5.el8 but stream goes from foo-1-4.el8 to -6.el8. It could be that
rhel ships bar-1.0-5, but stream is already at bar-1.1-1, and doesn't have
any update because 1.1 already fixed the problem.
Most of the other problems (automation, figuring out when and where to grab
package, getting koji to play nice, etc..) could be coded and worked
around. But if the package isn't built for CentOS Stream, there is no work
around for that.
Our current solution is to create <package>-epel packages that only have
the missing sub-packages.
There are some drawbacks, but it works.[1][2]
Troy
[1] -
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/lmdb-epel
[2] -
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mobile-broadband-provider-info-epel