Re: [CentOS-devel] Handling packages retired in epel but not yet available in CentOS?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 14 May 2020 at 20:00, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 3:32 PM Michel Alexandre Salim
>  <michel(a)michel-slm.name&gt; wrote:
>  >
>  > Hi,
>  >
>  > We're working on validating CentOS 8 for some desktop use cases at work,
>  > and noticed that after working fine on a machine that's installed
>  > several months ago, it's now failing on a freshly-installed machine.
>
>  Do not get me *started* on the ansible version fun and games, or the
>  confusing state of the python3 for various EPEL, RHEL and CentOS
>  migrations. The situation is exacerbated when RHEL elects to use a
>  kind-of-sort-of distinct naming scheme for software previously
>  published via EPEL.
>
>  It's an ongoing problem. EPEL's decision to show only the most recent
>  versions of RPMs, and to trim old RPMs out, is a destabilizing problem
>  and why I make hrdlinked snapshots of EPEL using "rsnapshot" for
>  internal access to old packages.
>  
To be clear here.. the 'decision' is that EPEL is built using the same
build system that Fedora uses. The Fedora build system does not keep older
versions of packages in its composes for a space and so EPEL can not keep
older versions of packages either. We tried several 'hacks' to do this and
they broke the Fedora side or didn't do what we wanted on the EPEL side
either.

At this point it is either someone finding the time to deep dive into pungi
and other tools to make it work for this 2 different case mode or moving
EPEL to a different build system. Both are giant projects which no one has
had the time to do.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.