[EPEL-devel] Discussing a policy for missing subpackages

[Michel Alexandre Salim]

Dear all,

In working to populate EPEL9 with packages we need at work that are
missing from Stream 9, I stumbled upon a gray area: C9S' iptables has
subpackages that are disabled by conditionals, and the delta between the
C9S package and the EPEL package is tiny, and I initially thought this
qualified as an `-epel` package that can bypass review, per

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/epel-faq/#rhel_8_has_binaries_i...

Looking at systemd-extras, which is similar but in this case the C8S/C9S
systemd package actively stripped some subpackages that are shipped in
Fedora, I'm no longer sure though.

Per discussion on IRC, it does seem that we actually have three cases:
- shipping subpackages that upstream built but excluded from shipping
  (e.g. the case of missing -devel) -- use -epel in the short term, file
  a bug requesting it to be shipped in the long term
- shipping subpackages that are disabled using conditionals, so it's
  trivial to reenable and rebase the EPEL package against the original
  going forward -- e.g. iptables-epel (?) that ships legacy subpackages
- shipping subpackages that are hard-disabled in C8S/C9S (e.g.
  systemd-extras shipping networkd and timesyncd).

I've filed an issue to bring up to next week's EPEL meeting, please send
your suggestions there: https://pagure.io/epel/issue/134

Thanks!

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
profile: https://keyoxide.org/[e-mail]