On 15 December 2017 at 07:59, Fabian Arrotin arrfab@centos.org wrote:
On 15/12/17 09:47, Fabian Arrotin wrote:
On 15/12/17 04:52, Mihai Moldovan wrote:
Since my initial report, either even more packages mysteriously vanished or I simply didn't notice the highly diverging number of packages in the ppc64 and ppc64le repositories.
However, as of right now, both repositories have only 24 packages in common.
274(!) packages are missing from the ppc64 repository but are available in the ppc64le repository.
So let's dive into that assumption : when you say that pkgs are missing from the Extras repository, are you using the upstream Extras repository to compare against ? As said in previous mail, I don't think that there is an Extras channel for ppc64 (but that exists for ppc64le) but again, that's something also the ppc64/ppc64le maintainer would have to answer.
BTW if the CentOS Extras policy should indeed be (and we tried to have a rule enforcement during CBS meetings about this, but no consensus) to only include packages from upstream Extras repository, then my understanding is that we 'd even have to delete packages there not in the upstream extras
But that would not be possible, as that would also mean removing all centos pkgs like centos-release-* for the SIGs content
For the record of that libssh pkg for ppc64, it was only included in 7.2.1511 os repo for ppc64 (we have a daily snapshot of mirror.centos.org content) :
/20151216/altarch/7.2.1511/os/ppc64/Packages/libssh-0.6.4-4.el7.ppc64.rpm
but nothing after that, and even in the base distro it was replaced by libssh2, which is still there : http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7.4.1708/os/ppc64/Packages/libssh2-1.4.3-10...
So I guess that some pkgs from upstream Extras repo were still needed the previous libssh pkg, so rebuilt in the Extras repo instead, but once again, something we *never* had (so no, it didn't "vanish" from the ppc64 repo)
Just for people reading it, but not following discussions in #centos-devel :
We confirmed with Mihai that we never shipped that libssh pkg in centos extras for ppc64, but that it was initially in /os/ for 7.2.1511.
When that package was removed from /os/ it was then available in Epel, but recently, it seems such libssh pkg was also removed from Epel, because it entered Extras, but only for ppc64le/x86_64 ..
That explains so the confusion, but from my PoV, I guess the pkg can still be either back in Epel for ppc64, or we can try to build it for ppc64, despite the fact that it doensn't exist 'upstream' (lack of Extras repo for ppc64)
PPC64 is a positive pain in the butt to deal with because various packages will not compile at all, will compile for it but not work correctly (too much software written with the all the worlds little ended), or needing special care because it is in certain architectures but not all. When we put stuff in ppc in EPEL it gets built for all the architectures which means we have to make sure that the version is a lower NEVR from what is in CentOS/RHEL for that version so that we don't replace the upstream version. [it two versions have the same NEVR then yum/dnf will choose whichever one is lower by other heuristics which can make EPEL the one installed when the RHEL one is the one supported.] This is extra steps and work as packages in RHEL get updated more than previously.
I don't have a good solution on the top of my brain.. I am open to suggestions to try and come up with one.