At the Hyperscale SIG, one of the repos we ship (centos-release- hyperscale-hotfixes, which we use to override modular content we need to fix as MBS is not available to SIGs) depends on EPEL (because the packages there, for example libvirt, needs dependencies in EPEL).
EPEL's Quickstart recommends enabling codeready-builder on RHEL8, and the corresponding powertools repo on CentOS 8: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#Quickstart
Could we possibly just enable powertools by default? CRB is on by default in RHEL8 UBI containers (but weirdly not in the related CentOS Stream containers!).
There are multiple unactionable bugs in Bugzilla for EPEL about uninstallable packages, e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1890414
that ends up with the maintainer telling the reporter to just enable powertools.
A proof-of-concept we tested in Hyperscale is to just enable PowerTools in %posttrans: https://git.centos.org/rpms/centos-release-hyperscale/c/03b6fd490be2571efa60...
That way we can make sure that Powertools is already enabled for future transactions installing packages from our repos, but not potentially break the transaction itself by changing the set of packages available.
(note: not shipped yet)
But we'd rather not have to do this, and just have Powertools enabled to begin with. Failing that, have this kludge in epel-release so we get it for free for our packages that depend on EPEL.
Looking at PowerTools, there's a lot of packages there, esp. in the Python stack, that I could imagine many Python library or application shipped in EPEL would be uninstallable if the repo is disabled.
Best regards,