On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 10:43 AM Brian Stinson brian@bstinson.com wrote:
To me this isn't a "building" question, this is a "delivery" question. Currently the guidance is for the SIGs to own their dependency chain, and to ship their deliverables depending on things that are self-contained (or self-contained to CentOS-built content at least).
Currently there is a lot of EPEL rebuild activity going on to support the SIGs, and I think this is where we can make some improvements with the converged git structure. We, in general, want to make it easier to take things from Fedora/EPEL branches and convert them into CentOS branches, and that workflow would make the process of consuming EPEL packages (even with a rebuild) a lot less painful.
As someone who builds and uses EPEL, I'd really rather have downstream consumers in CentOS contributing upstream in Fedora EPEL. I'm aware that a number of my packages wind up getting forked into CentOS SIGs because of the current policy, and while it is their right to do so, I've always been unhappy with that because their changes are more or less walled off and they don't care to upstream anything.
CentOS and EPEL should not be a one-way street, and it is. In my view, that's the underlying problem. If, for example, Koji EPEL build references were auto-populated into the CBS so that they can be tagged in, and if CentOS and Fedora accounts were federated so that CentOS folks can submit PRs to Fedora Dist-Git on EPEL branches and get those merged and built in Fedora Koji for EPEL to tag into CBS, that'd be way better.
Sadly, I don't know if that's even possible today...