EPEL epel7 planning and processes

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> I wouldn't think so no. I would say all epel7 packages MUST use
> systemd units. I don't know the state of the systemd rpm macros in
> rhel7, we would need to figure that out. Hopefully they are all there.

+1000 from me.  Won't be sad to see the death of those things. ;-)

>> Now that you mention it though, I wonder if we should bother with the
>> systemd-sysv-convert stuff [1] for EPEL7?  It got dropped from the
>> Fedora guidelines (again, because it's been three years...) and
>> Lennart seemed to think it was a bad idea in general, but the utility
>> is indeed shipped in the RHEL 7 beta.
>
> IMHO, we should not allow sysvinit stuff at all. It's just a hassle
> and everyone should have already migrated anyhow.

Well, systemd-sysv-convert is an upgrade thing that lets you transfer
enabled/disabled status from your old initscripts to your shiny new
systemd units.  It's useful even in a mystical initscript-free future.

That being said, if you're the type of person who runs RHEL, you're
probably a.) paranoid about automatic _anything_ b.) using
ansible/puppet/whatever to manage that kind of thing anyway and/or c.)
going to want to go over your enabled services with a fine-toothed
comb post-upgrade regardless.

So it's probably not worth bothering about.

>> In the past, this would have been handwaved away by saying RHEL
>> doesn't support upgrades, but rumor has it that this won't be the case
>> this time around. ;-)
>
> Yeah, I worry about that. We may want to say that EPEL doesn't support
> them. I mean, upgrade path from epel6 is something we could easily
> check and ask people to keep working, but there's lots of packages I
> suspect where upgrades are a lot more complex... Perhaps we should say
> "it might work, but if not, sorry"

"If it breaks you get to keep both pieces" ought to be Fedora's fifth
foundation.  :-P

I think that EVR upgrade path issues should be fixed, because
seriously how hard is it to fix that?

We really don't provide any sort of assurance on upgrades beyond that
even in Fedora.  If something changes config file format or whatever,
you're generally expected to deal with it yourself.  I don't see how
EPEL would be any different.

-T.C.