Hello EPEL world,

The recent decision to replace the Essex release of OpenStack in EPEL
with the compatibility-breaking Folsom release has completely hosed
our OpenStack environment.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the valuable lessons we've learned from
this experience:

I desperately need to find a repository with the Essex packages.  They
don't appear to exist (at least, not all of them) in Koji, and our
local snapshots have already rolled over.  Any pointers would be
greatly appreciated.
I've been wondering about that same decision. This update goes against the philosophies of EPEL.
Packages in EPEL should be supported for the full life cycle of the Enterprise Linux they are build against. Additionally, they should strive to never require manual update procedures or processes. During the stable part of the EPEL cycle, packages shouldn't update in a way that changes the user experence[sic] or otherwise adds more than bugfixes.
The Folsom upgrade, according to the release notes ( http://wiki.openstack.org/ReleaseNotes/Folsom) lists a myriad of changes that break existing installations and/or require manual updates. This push has set my project back a least a week with many man hours wasted.