On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 10:59 AM Japheth Cleaver cleaver@terabithia.org wrote:
In light of the announcement, but also specifically:
https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q8-i-need-to-buildtest-my-packages-for-epel-l...
https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q9-epel-8-needs-access-to-packages-which-are-...
...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