Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
Sorry what I meant that it is built against all of RHEL not just a
couple of channels. Again this isn't a promise we ever made, but one
people assume we have made (and get surprised when they find out
differently).
I can only imagine how difficult this gets for EPEL maintainers, even
the ones with the RHEL Developer Suite subscription. There are just a
lot of add-ons and channels to track, even ones not in the RHEL Dev.
As I've mentioned in years prior, the only way to prevent this is for
the CentOS team to build everything, and that's a tall order, and only
getting to be a bigger and bigger task by the day. So EPEL is really
one of those things that Red Hat customers pull down, but don't enable
... until something specifically is needed, and then it's checked for
conflicts, and only on a small subset of systems.
Non-Red Hat customers running CentOS usually have a much easier task
of enabling EPEL, although there can still be some issues.
And this is where I made things worse by conflicting with channels
versus "entire OS"
I don't think there is a perfect answer that satisfies all, and never
will be. And definitely not 4-5 years into where EPEL is today, from
where the Red Hat product line went more and more vertical than it
ever was before.
It's one of those things that people have just accepted. Although it
is good for maintainers to recognize that the EPEL build system is
going to -- gasp -- build against Red Hat packages, and not CentOS. ;)
Probably but I would prefer to either have them one way or another
:).
I would prefer not to have the "where is my N?" during the decay days
of EPEL-6 that we are seeing in EL-5 as packages get EOL'd that
people expected to be there.
Maybe I'm throwing this out in ignorance ...
But maybe [Red Hat] Software Collections ([RH]SCL) offers a baseline
for a "reasonable lifecycle" that should be a target? I.e., 3 years.
E.g., any software that makes it into EPEL will have a "soft target"
of at least 3 years support?
Just a suggestion ... one that RHSCL users are familiar with. I think
it's unreasonable to expect updates beyond that, or at least not
without a rebase after 3 years.
As always, just my $0.02 ... from a Red Hat customer standpoint, not a
community one.
--
Bryan J Smith -
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith