On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, JC Júnior wrote:
I received a message about EPEL repository, I would like to know if this repo is long term support too.
Let me add that an effort to make sure EPEL is compatible with RPMforge failed as EPEL wants to become the only repository for RHEL and there is no interest to consider current RPMforge users.
EPEL refused the repotag, so one cannot easily identify where a package comes from and mixing repositories becomes harder. Since compatibility is a 2 way interaction and EPEL shows no interest, it is certain that mixing EPEL with other repositories may break something.
Also EPEL's Fedora legacy makes EPEL closer to Fedora's Extras packages than they are with RPMforge's packages, which can lead to problems with eg. nagios-plugins or clamav packages.
I already foresee a lot of frustration caused by bug-reports that make it not clear that packages come from EPEL (much like in the Fedora era where Fedora Extras packages caused problems with RPMforge that were hard to identify or fix).
Also, EPEL packages only exist for RHEL4 and RHEL5, resp 340 and 600 projects while RPMforge builds for RHEL2, RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5, about 3400 projects. We however do not provide any PPC packages.
As always, be careful what you enable and cherry pick rather than enable fully.
PS Within a corporate environment, look at the mrepo tool for managing repositories and cherry picking packages for deploying and managing systems. Do not enable repositories company wide !
-- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]