Broken URL for epel-release, strategy for the future

[Tony Yarusso]

So as background, our product's installation script contains a line
which reads:
rpm -Uvh
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

This week, we had a customer contact us complaining because our product
didn't work.  Well, it turned out the cause was the deletion of that
file when
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm was posted.

The point being, there needs to be a URL that does not get broken at
random, so that people have something they can rely on.  I don't want to
have to check your repo every day to see if the file happened to change,
and then scramble to release a new version of our product with one line
updated in the installer script - that's silly.

One possibility would be to manually define HTTP redirects in the web
server configuration.  Another would be a generic
epel-release-5.noarch.rpm that was a symlink to the current sub-version.
I don't know what would be best for you as far as implementation, but
the regardless the result needs to be that someone can make a request
for epel-release-5.3.noarch.rpm and get a successful response.  The
solution you come up with should make any such link valid until RHEL 5
reaches EOL.

-- 
Tony Yarusso
Technical Team
___
Nagios Enterprises, LLC
Email:  tyarusso at nagios.com
Web:    www.nagios.com