[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

[Jeff Sheltren]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> hi guys,
>
> One bit of feedback at LinuxCon this year from people was that we should
> ship epel with a lower barrier to entry. And I have mixed feelings about
> that. But I wanted to know what everyone else thinks about :
>

EPEL is the first thing I add to most servers I manage (CentOS or
RHEL).  I would like the added convenience of having it included by
default -- either of the options you listed would be OK for me from
that perspective.  However, including it in the base OS doesn't make a
lot of sense to me as we look for a way to scale it out to include
other repos as well.  Adding those to CentOS Extras seems like the way
to go to make it a low barrier of entry to enable repos (I assume with
some sort of qualification before we include them).

I have to say though, I rarely use CentOS Extras, and I'd be more
likely to stick with adding EPEL in a kickstart file.  I understand
that's not for everyone though.

<snip from kickstart>
repo --name=epel --baseurl=http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/
[...]
%packages
@base
epel-release
[...]
</snip>

-Jeff