EPEL EPIC! [was Re: and SCL]

[Orion Poplawski]

On 03/21/2014 12:06 PM, Ken Dreyer wrote:
> 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

Seconded.  There are problems (<cough>puppet<cough>), but overall it has been 
a big boon.


-- 
Orion Poplawski
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