On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 7:31 PM Kevin Kofler via devel devel@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Pavel Raiskup wrote:
First I don't feel comfortable announcing this, I'm not happy about the situation and so I don't want to be the lightning rod :-). But I believe that we can come to acceptable Copr/Mock solution and this needs to be discussed... so here we are.
I, too, believe that we can come to an acceptable solution. Unfortunately, I do not consider the one you propose to be acceptable, at all.
I am proposing (as PR against mock upstream ATM [1]) to switch the default epel-* configuration from CentOS+EPEL to RHEL+EPEL as soon as possible (see the pull request [1]).
I think there are only 2 reasonable defaults: Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux (just pick whatever of those works better in practice, it should not really matter). In particular:
Neither of those have much track history. The easy move is to use CentOS 8 Stream for "mock", at least in the short term.
The alternative is to designate the CentOS switch to streaming deployments as a non-starter, and re-invent point releases on top of CentOS 8 Stream It's likely to create small discrepancies with packages released, and rejected or withdrawn, from CentOs 8 Stream before they get to RHEL 8. Since CentOS 8 Stream is the new beta for RHEL 8, this would seem inevitable.
It's a waste of time and resources to generate and manage the relevant repodata, exacerbated by the multiple unwelcome and randomly overlapping channels of CentOS 8. Multiple snapshots of a repo are also not free in disk space or inodes. But I'm not sure if the more "replicate only" distributions will be long-lived multi-platform enough to rely on for EPEL, and I'd expect screaming from various security and support experts if EPEL relies on anything not directly published by Red Hat. I'm finding myself sad that Scientific Linux withdrew from publishing new releases in deference to CentOS.