Meeting summary/notes from today's EPEL meeting 2010-02-12

[Till Maas]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 02:11:13PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 01:19:20PM +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 04:49:08PM -0600, BJ Dierkes wrote:
> > 
> > 21:19:27 <derks> that's great
> > 21:19:52 <stickster> The unanimous response I got from the folks I
> > talked to was, "Yup, we're doing that now, and will keep doing so"
> 
> I could never get in touch with the openmotif maintainer to do something
> consistent between fedora/RHEL/EPEL for motif based software (like
> consistent virtual provides). After some attemps I gave up, but it was 
> when I was more active in Fedora/EPEL so some time ago, maybe things 
> have changed since then.
> 
> > Also there seems to be no trace about the whole situation. Also it seems
> > that more or less any documentation regarding EPEL is not maintained,
> > e.g. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL contains a log of stale
> > content:
> > 
> > Latest report on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Reports is from
> > 2008, week 17
> 
> Apart from Reports are there specific parts that are out of date? I
> tried to review the whole EPEL wiki in the end of 2008, I don't think
> that there were much changes afterwards, except from switching to bodhi
> and koji, and I just checked that this has been rightly taken into 
> account.
> 
> In fact the 'moving' parts of the EPEL wiki have always been late
> (like report meetings, schedule and things like that) but the remaining
> should be ok now. The FAQ is marked to be needing love, but, honestly 
> I can't see serious issues.

Without having Reports or links to Meeting summaries from Meetbot, it is
very hard to know what has changed. I noticed that there seems to be no
information about what happened to python-setuptools in EPEL or what
would happen the next time a package is imported in RHEL, that existed
in EPEL. Or for which other packages this already happened.

Also there was this discussion on the list and meetings about what
exactly the package set in RHEL is, that EPEL does not conflict with,
but there seems to be no real answer to this in the wiki, too.

E.g. the FAQ only says to browse the SRPMS, but it's only some of the
SRPMS:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_know_which_packages_are_part_of_RHEL.3F

The policy says this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
| EPEL packages must never conflict with packages in RHEL Base (Including
| Advanced Platform).

This might be the actual policy, but it still does not says which
packages this includes and when I asked on this mailing list, even
someone more experienced than me did not really know.

Btw. this FAQ entry also contains some broken wiki syntax:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#What_is_the_policy_on_updates_for_packages_in_EPEL.3F

Then as you already mentioned, the Schedule probably only contains
outdated content:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/Schedule

> > Also the "Getting a Fedora package in EPEL"[0] procedure is not in sync
> > with what CVS admins require, as they might require a confirmation that
> > a maintainer has been asked:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243716#c15
> > But this is not what the procedure describes.
> 
> It is not clear that the problem here is with the documented guidelines.
> Have these guidelines changed? Or are the CVS admins having claims they
> shouldn't have? I'd lean to the second, though I may have missed a guideline
> change.

I don't know, I only experienced that both conflicted.

Regards
Till
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