[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

Thu Sep 13 18:15:35 UTC 2012
James A. Peltier <jpeltier at sfu.ca>

----- Original Message -----
| 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 :
| 
| 1) Shipping epel-release in CentOS-Extras, so its installable, usable
| out of the box.
| 
| 2) Shipping epel-release in the distro itself, with the epel repos's
| enabled=false. This is the option that most people seem to want, but
| I
| am least keen on.
| 
| 3) do nothing, leave things as they are.
| 
| Ofcourse, if we do either (1) or (2) we would need to set some sort
| of a
| baseline standard that allows other repo's to be included as well (
| as +
| if they meet the baseline standard )
| 

Do nothing.  There is a reason that they are not shipped with Upstream and that's because they haven't been vetted well enough to be considered "enterprise ready".  If the goal is to be as compatible as possible DO THAT!  Adding the EPEL repositories is a cake walk and it can be done in various ways.

Those who choose to install *any* third party repos are taking it upon themselves to ensure that the system doesn't break.  This may be through the use of yum priorities, some other method or a combination of methods.  I think it's just a plain bad idea.

-- 
James A. Peltier
Manager, IT Services - Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-6573
Fax     : 778-782-3045
E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices
          http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier

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