Hello,
Fabian suggested to post about https://pagure.io/centos-infra/issue/306 so we can have a wider discussion around it. That ticket is specifically for the Hyperscale SIG, but I think this is something that could be generally useful.
Within Hyperscale, we have a need to build a few packages that have dependencies coming from EPEL. While we could rebuild those dependencies within the SIG, that seems both wasteful and undesirable, as it would lead to needless deviation and potentially discourage folks from maintaining stuff in EPEL (where it has a chance to benefit the most people). So, our conclusion was that it would be great to just depend directly on EPEL and have it added to our build targets in CBS so we can build against it.
One concern with doing this is that EPEL is kind of a moving target. This doesn't really apply to Hyperscale (as we track CentOS Stream), but it could be relevant for SIGs tracking CentOS Linux. Still, this would just be a non-default option for a SIG to add to their build tags, so I don't think this will be much of a problem in practice.
From my chat with Fabian I understand this was raised in the past and there had been policy concerns around it. I'd love to get more context around this and see if we can get them addressed. Alternatively, if there are no concerns I'd be happy to entertain suggestions on how to actually do this :) Thanks!
Cheers Davide