Hi Folks,
We're gearing up to build the next minor release of CentOS Linux 8 so I thought now would be a good time to revisit the conversation we've been having about what to do with unshipped -devel packages. Just a reminder on a few guiding principles:
- The BaseOS, AppStream, and PowerTools repos in CentOS Linux are designed and composed to match Upstream as closely as possible, both in content and behavior
- Unshipped devel packages have no defined maintenance lifecycle in Upstream, and especially not in CentOS
- We know that some of these devel packages are essential to build applications that the CentOS (and probably EPEL) communities care about.
The problems we need to solve if we decide to ship these packages somewhere in a CentOS artifact:
- Communicate that these packages are provided as-is and are not meant for runtime dependencies
- Provide the packages in a form that is consumable for individuals and the EPEL community
I'd like to propose that we create a separate repository, disabled by default that is composed of the -devel packages that we care about, bundled in a module.
The name of this repository and the module is up for discussion, but I would like the naming to help with the communication that these are not for general consumption.
I'd also like to discuss how we populate this repo/module. It would be easiest to just dump every unshipped package in and move on, but that doesn't help us track which of these packages are truly important outside of building the distro. Shipping *everything* also represents a larger content set to manage if lifecycle issues come up in the future. An alternative would be to store this definition in git (we'll need to do that anyways), and allow folks to make pull requests to include new content, shipping this as a separate repo would let us spin updates on demand.
Looking forward to the discussion!
-- Brian Stinson CentOS Infra Team