I thought I'd start an article on my personal blog on the various options for newer PHP (in particular), python, ruby etc options in CentOS - particularly given some of the base packages in EL6 have now passed EOL upstream and consequently some applications (eg OwnCloud) now have minimal dependencies greater than in base.

What I found on initial looks to SCL was at best confusing and in areas outright misleading, with help needed from Dominic in #centos-devel to work through the present SCL situation.

Doing a general Google search (or the @scl keyword in #centos) will take someone to here:

This refers to an old centos-release-SCL package which is still in the repos and would direct the user to unmaintained old versions.

The correct package is actually centos-release-scl ... yes just the case needs to change.

The documentation for centos-release-scl stuff (ie the CentOS SCL SIG stuff) is pretty much nonexistent for a user needing a newer version of a package. These pages are very CentOS developer focused and not really useful for the end user:

Then once the right package is installed the user can see there is php54, php55 and rh-php56 packages but it's not clear why the difference in the naming and there's nothing that highlights to someone that if they want to use php55 or rh-php56 they'll need to handle a migration to rh-httpd24 as well.

I'd suggest the first step is to have centos-release-scl obsolete centos-release-SCL so that users are not left on an unmaintained repository.

Then as I gather data for my article I'd really like to flesh out and improve the 'user facing' SCL wiki page.

Thoughts on this?

James