On Friday, 02 September 2022 at 18:25, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
On Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 12:12:07PM -0500, Maxwell G via epel-devel wrote:
On Wednesday, August 31, 2022 Troy Dawson wrote:
EPEL2RHEL is part of the RHEL 8 and 9 new package workflow. When a RHEL maintainer wants to add a package to RHEL 8 or 9 they start a "new package workflow". There are several automations that happen when they start that workflow. One of them is checking if the package is already in epel. If it is, it creates a bugzilla against that package, and links that bug against the EPEL2RHEL tracker. [1] Remember, this check currently happens at the beginning of the new package workflow. Before a package has been branched, built, or put into testing repos.
I think this whole process should be automated. File bugs that say "Heads up: your package will be automatically retired after the release of RHEL X.X" and provide some explanation. This will have multiple benefits:
- Saying "you'll have to do something in six months, but it'll be bad if you
do it now" is quite difficult to follow.
- We can send out one announcement to epel-announce about which packages are
going to be retired and when that'll happen, instead of retiring packages in a piecemeal manner.
The maintainers won't have to remember to do it.
If we find out that a package is buildroot only, then we'll close the bug
and exclude it from the automatic retiring.
I really like this approach... :)
It would be really nice if the wording of the bug could contain some kind of a "thank you" note to the EPEL maintainers of the package in question. Not everyone will understand this process as "great, I don't have to maintain package X anymore, Red Hat will be doing that for me from now on". Some folks may take it as "Oh no! Red Hat is taking away my toy! Why?!" Ideally, there should still be a way for EPEL maintainer(s) to continue contributing to the RHEL package.
Regards, Dominik