EPEL EPIC! [was Re: and SCL]

[Ken Dreyer]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 6:25 AM, Peter Lemenkov <lemenkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-03-21 16:07 GMT+04:00 Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>:
>
>>> It doesn't exist, it's an idea that Robyn has floated semi-seriously
>>> as a way to provide a repo that moves faster than EPEL. Rather than
>>> try to jam fast-moving stuff in to EPEL, the idea was to do an Extra
>>> Packages for Infrastructure and Cloud (EPIC) that had a different,
>>> faster-moving charter. EPIC would target the *EL platform just as EPEL
>>> does.
>
> Faster moving rate is great indeed. But adding more than on version of
> software (no matter of how many repos it takes) means only one - we
> have to impose additional support requiremetns on a packagers.
>
> The "social contract" requiremens for EPEL "support" (which of souce
> isn't a "real" support) is way too high for the average maintainer.
> That's the reason I believe the entire EPEL idea was a huge mistake
> and waste of time - unfortunately I failed to discuss this with other
> fellow fedora members during FOSDEM Fedora.NEXT related talks.

I think everyone speaks from their own corner of EPEL and the packages
they care about. I know EPEL feels like a mistake and a waste of time
to you in the context of your past discussions about the Erlang
packages (and maybe you're thinking of others as well). From my own
perspective, there are a ton of packages in EPEL that I rely on which
are quite stable (for example the Perl ones).

When I imagine a world without EPEL, individual users and sites would
still need to address the problems of remediating CVEs, dealing with
unstable upstreams, etc., but they wouldn't have the benefit of
sharing the infrastructure and testing with other sites.

There are certainly areas for improvement, like any open-source
project, but I wanted to share my perspective that I think EPEL still
does more good than harm, even in its current form.

- Ken