On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 17:10 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Rex Dieter wrote:
Karanbir Singh wrote:
Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 04:36:52PM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
EPEL is interesting and it has a lot of potential, but the fact that they only care about, build for and expect usage on RHEL tends to sort of exclude a lot of external participation in the project. So much so that a @redhat person said that the only aim they have in pushing epel is to they can go tell their customers about it!!
I don't think this is quite fair. At the FUDCon discussion I was at, there was considerable interest in working on -- and with -- CentOS.
This is based on what was told to us at Fosdem 2007.
You were told or heard wrong. (:
We were told this in very exact terms, wasent much room for any form of interpretation. I am sure you can imagine this wasent taken very quietly. But, well, this is what we were told.
A few selected quotes from the EPEL Wiki pages:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/About
Goals of the EPEL effort Make high quality packages that get developed and tested in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivates like CentOS of [sic] Scientific Linux. Community Perspective Many members of the Fedora community are also users/administrators of enterprise Linux distributions that are derived from Fedora, such as RHEL and CentOS. Everyone has their own reasons for promoting a particular piece of software. Fedora enterprise packages are they best way to gain users and support from enterprise Linux users.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ
Are EPEL packages available only for RHEL or also for compatible derivatives? Packages are freely available and it is an explicit goal of the project to make sure they are usable for RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS or Scientific Linux.
How can I install the packages? The plan is to distribute EPEL to users of RHEL4 via a repository that can be used with up2date. CentOS and Scientific Linux both use yum, which should be able to use the same software repository and thus can be used to install EPEL packages.
I'm an Extras contributor and want to maintain my packages in EPEL, too. What do I have to do and what do you expect from me? ... For testing the packages before and after building please use RHEL if you have a license, or the freely available RHEL-based distros such as CentOS or Scientific Linux.
What's the best package to build for EPEL4? centos.karan.org rebuild a lot of FC-3 packages for CentOS 4 -- these packages and/or the FC-3 branch of Fedora Extras is a good stating point for EPEL4 packages.
Perhaps the listened to the feedback, and/or not everybody was on-message. They seem to be very welcoming of rebuild users, and even complementary of efforts like karan.org.
Phil