On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 13:41, Frank Cox theatre@sasktel.net wrote:
I'd like to run this by you guys and get your opinion.
For those of us who are considering moving to Oracle Linux (or at least doing some experimenting with it), I just had an idea for dealing with the fact that the oracle-el-epel apparently doesn't have all of the packages that are in the fedora-el-epel that we all know and love.
It makes sense to me to use the oracle epel with OL to the greatest extent possible simply because it's part of OL.
To get around the missing package issue, what about setting up both oracle-epel and fedora-epel, and then using the dnf priorities to pick the stuff from oracle-epel first and if it's not there then grab it from fedora-epel.
Having done this for years.. choose one or the other. Do NOT mix the two. You will end up with heartache and sleepless nights trying to figure out why things are broken. If you are lucky it is something easy like an update is broken because the missing EPEL package wants a library that the OEL has an older version of. In other cases it is the same thing but the soname was good enough to make rpm think it would work.
I say this as a former EPEL package leader.. either use Oracle EPEL and figure out how to interact with them to get their rebuilds done faster or do the same with Fedora EPEL. Priorities and similar filtering tools work well enough if you have focused repositories where small sets may overlap but you want X to take over from Y. In the case of nearly 1:1 repos, you will end up with it working 95%-99% of the time and then burning down the house.