On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 10:59 AM Japheth Cleaver <cleaver(a)terabithia.org> wrote:
In light of the announcement, but also specifically:
https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q8-i-need-to-buildtest-my-packages-for-epe...
https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q9-epel-8-needs-access-to-packages-which-a...
...it seems appropriate to open up a discussion here.
With point releases, at least there was the possibility of flag days
around EPEL ABI changes, however with a rolling release format there
seems to need to be an active synchronization around such changes, as
"expected" breakages aren't really occurring around a public release
cycle.
Let me clarify one thing. That FAQ made it sound like EPEL is built
off CentOS. It is not. It is based off RHEL. RHEL7, RHEL8, and
eventually RHEL9.
For RHEL8 there are about 40 devel packages (mostly) that are only
partly released in RHEL8. This means that <package> was released, but
<package>-devel was not.
There is currently an obscure CentOS repo that provides about 20 of
those packages. It looks like we (EPEL) have a year to figure out a
better way to get those packages.
We did have other proposals to get those packages, but getting them
from that CentOS repo was the easiest, so that's how we went. We'll
just have to use one of our other methods to get them. Might even be
better, we might get all 40 this time.
Beyond this, I feel like the situation between the RHEL, CentOS, and
Fedora groups here is becoming more and more untenable. If CentOS Linux
is going away (after EL7), then there really needs to be more clarity
about what mainline EPEL is targeting. And if there's a version of EPEL
that's going to target CentOS Stream after all (and it's not EPEL
Playground), then it needs to be marked as such.
There is already a proposal called epel-next that is in the works
where the EPEL packages will be built off CentOS Stream. Not all of
EPEL, just the ones that break on CentOS Stream, and/or where a
developer wants to have a newer package released when the next RHEL
get's released.
I don't know why I'm not able to find the nice description about
epel-next that I read earlier in the day. If someone else has a
better description, feel free to chime in.
Troy Dawson