Upcoming EPEL 10.1 retirement

[Carl George]

Howdy EPEL packagers,

In accordance with the EPEL policy for minor version end-of-life [0],
EPEL 10.1 will be retired once RHEL 10.2 is released.  Based on
historical RHEL release dates [1], this is expected to occur sometime
this month.  After the retirement, MirrorManager will direct RHEL 10
users to the EPEL 10.2 repo instead.

Similar to a Fedora release end-of-life, any EPEL 10.1 updates that
have not been pushed to stable by the time of the retirement
will be marked as obsolete and will not be promoted to stable.
Additionally, any outstanding epel10.1 side tags will be removed
during the retirement.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply here or stop by the EPEL
Matrix channel [2].

[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/epel-policy/#policy_for_end_of_lif...
[1] https://access.redhat.com/articles/red-hat-enterprise-linux-release-dates
[2] https://matrix.to/#/#epel:fedoraproject.org

[Diego Herrera]

Hello EPEL packagers

Since RHEL 10.2 is starting to be available through several channels, we are going to start the retirement of the 10.1 branch and the archival of the 10.1 content. Also we are going to prepare the infrastructure so that EPEL 10.2 content will start being built from RHEL 10.2. All these changes will be done in accordance to the defined SOP [0].

If you have any questions, feel free to reply here or stop by the EPEL Matrix channel [1].

[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/release_guide/sop_epel_minor_eol/
[1] https://matrix.to/#/#epel:fedoraproject.org

[Diego Herrera]

The EPEL 10.1 has been retired as planned and the EPEL 10.2 packages are now building from RHEL 10.2 content. Some of the RHEL 10.2 ppc64le packages are is still being processed, so some packages might not build correctly until all the content is synchronized properly.

[Mikko Saukkoriipi]

This quick retirement has caused problems for us, and will also cause 
increased load for Fedora.

Until now our organisation has maintained our own EPEL mirrors and we 
have mirrored it from FUNET's Finnish EPEL mirror causing zero load for 
Fedora. We can't continue doing this anymore and we need to start 
mirroring directly from Fedora's archive.

The problem is that FUNET's EPEL 10.1 mirror is now empty and we still 
need it since we will have RHEL 10.1 servers remaining for couple months 
until they have all gone through their update cycles.

Originally we noticed this problem when a lot of our RHEL10 servers 
started failing dnf updates because python3-pyOpenSSL had incompatible 
requirements. The cause for this issue was that until now we had been 
mirroring EPEL version 10, like we had been doing with 9, 8, 7 and so 
on, but the version 10 directory actually contained packages for the 
future 10.3 release. It seems that you should also retire the non-minor 
EPEL 10, it's existence will cause perplexing problems.

Mikko Saukkoriipi

[Carl George]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2026 at 9:08 AM Mikko Saukkoriipi
 wrote:
> This quick retirement has caused problems for us, and will also cause
> increased load for Fedora.

The timing for the retirement isn't "quick", it's based on the RHEL
schedule.  New minor versions are released every six months, and as
soon as a minor version is released the previous one is EOL.  RHEL has
extended add-ons you can buy to continue getting security updates for
certain older minor versions, but there is no equivalent on the EPEL
side.
> Until now our organisation has maintained our own EPEL mirrors and we
> have mirrored it from FUNET's Finnish EPEL mirror causing zero load for
> Fedora. We can't continue doing this anymore and we need to start
> mirroring directly from Fedora's archive.

How about just rsyncing from that mirror without the `--delete` flag?
When they remove the content you will retain it on your mirror.

Or just sync the content from the Fedora archive, that's what it's there for.
> The problem is that FUNET's EPEL 10.1 mirror is now empty and we still
> need it since we will have RHEL 10.1 servers remaining for couple months
> until they have all gone through their update cycles.

Anyone that needs content past the EOL is free to keep their last
synced copy or fetch it from the archive.  We have to be conscious of
disk usage for the entire mirror network, so we will continue removing
EOL content from main mirror.
> Originally we noticed this problem when a lot of our RHEL10 servers
> started failing dnf updates because python3-pyOpenSSL had incompatible
> requirements. The cause for this issue was that until now we had been
> mirroring EPEL version 10, like we had been doing with 9, 8, 7 and so
> on, but the version 10 directory actually contained packages for the
> future 10.3 release. It seems that you should also retire the non-minor
> EPEL 10, it's existence will cause perplexing problems.

epel/10 is indeed a symlink to the latest minor version, currently
10.3, which is built against CentOS.  epel/10z is a symlink to the
minor version corresponding to the current minor version of RHEL 10,
currently 10.2.  If you only want content for RHEL then you can switch
to syncing epel/10z, but be aware you'll still see issues if you're
holding back your OS on RHEL 10.1 while that symlink moves on to EPEL
10.2.
> Mikko Saukkoriipi
>
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