Does EPEL support people who do not upgrade RHEL?

[Petr Pisar]

Hello,

I have a question regarding packaging for EPEL.

Fedora renamed perl package to perl-interpreter package and changed all
the occurances in all spec files. Because there are package maintainers who
share spec files between Fedora and EPEL, I added the perl-interpreter
package to EPEL.

Later RHEL-7.6 updated perl to provide perl-interpreter (as a RPM Provides,
not as a real package), so the perl-interpreter package in EPEL is not needed
anymore.

Now the next step is removing perl-interpreter from EPEL as requested in
a bug #1663304. That seems reasonable because EPEL should not deliver things
provided by RHEL.

However, my concern is people who did not upgrade RHEL to 7.6. If I remove
perl-interpreter from EPEL, it could break their systems.

What does an EPEL community recommend?

-- Petr

[Igor Gnatenko]

I believe that EPEL is not meant to support all possible old versions of
RHEL. It is built against latest release, so the expectation is that it
supports only latest release.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019, 09:46 Petr Pisar <ppisar(a)redhat.com wrote:

>  Hello,
>
>  I have a question regarding packaging for EPEL.
>
>  Fedora renamed perl package to perl-interpreter package and changed all
>  the occurances in all spec files. Because there are package maintainers who
>  share spec files between Fedora and EPEL, I added the perl-interpreter
>  package to EPEL.
>
>  Later RHEL-7.6 updated perl to provide perl-interpreter (as a RPM Provides,
>  not as a real package), so the perl-interpreter package in EPEL is not
>  needed
>  anymore.
>
>  Now the next step is removing perl-interpreter from EPEL as requested in
>  a bug #1663304. That seems reasonable because EPEL should not deliver
>  things
>  provided by RHEL.
>
>  However, my concern is people who did not upgrade RHEL to 7.6. If I remove
>  perl-interpreter from EPEL, it could break their systems.
>
>  What does an EPEL community recommend?
>
>  -- Petr
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[Kevin Fenzi]

On 1/4/19 12:54 AM, Igor Gnatenko wrote:
>  I believe that EPEL is not meant to support all possible old versions
> of
>  RHEL. It is built against latest release, so the expectation is that it
>  supports only latest release. 
Correct. We build against and only support the latest minor release in
both rhel6 and rhel7.

kevin

[Petr Pisar]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 11:36:31AM -0800, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  On 1/4/19 12:54 AM, Igor Gnatenko wrote:
>  > I believe that EPEL is not meant to support all possible old versions of
>  > RHEL. It is built against latest release, so the expectation is that it
>  > supports only latest release.
>  
>  Correct. We build against and only support the latest minor release in
>  both rhel6 and rhel7.
>   
Thanks for the assurance. Then I will proceed.

-- Petr