[CentOS-devel] EPEL (was Re: Octave for CentOS5)

[Phil Schaffner]

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 17:10 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Karanbir Singh wrote:
> > 
> >> Matthew Miller wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 04:36:52PM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> >>>> EPEL is interesting and it has a lot of potential, but the fact that
> >>>> they only care about, build for and expect usage on RHEL tends to sort
> >>>> of exclude a lot of external participation in the project. So much so
> >>>> that a @redhat person said that the only aim they have in pushing epel
> >>>> is to they can go tell their customers about it!!
> >>> I don't think this is quite fair. At the FUDCon discussion I was at,
> >>> there was considerable interest in working on -- and with -- CentOS.
> > 
> >> This is based on what was told to us at Fosdem 2007.
> > 
> > You were told or heard wrong. (:
> > 
> 
> We were told this in very exact terms, wasent much room for any form of 
> interpretation. I am sure you can imagine this wasent taken very 
> quietly. But, well, this is what we were told.

A few selected quotes from the EPEL Wiki pages:

http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/About

        Goals of the EPEL effort
                Make high quality packages that get developed and tested
                in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivates
                like CentOS of [sic] Scientific Linux.
        Community Perspective
                Many members of the Fedora community are also
                users/administrators of enterprise Linux distributions
                that are derived from Fedora, such as RHEL and CentOS.
                Everyone has their own reasons for promoting a
                particular piece of software. Fedora enterprise packages
                are they best way to gain users and support from
                enterprise Linux users. 
                
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ

        Are EPEL packages available only for RHEL or also for compatible
        derivatives?
                Packages are freely available and it is an explicit goal
                of the project to make sure they are usable for
                RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS or Scientific
                Linux.

How can I install the packages?
                The plan is to distribute EPEL to users of RHEL4 via a
                repository that can be used with up2date. CentOS and
                Scientific Linux both use yum, which should be able to
                use the same software repository and thus can be used to
                install EPEL packages.
        
        I'm an Extras contributor and want to maintain my packages in
        EPEL, too. What do I have to do and what do you expect from me?
                ...
                For testing the packages before and after building
                please use RHEL if you have a license, or the freely
                available RHEL-based distros such as CentOS or
                Scientific Linux.
        
        What's the best package to build for EPEL4?
                centos.karan.org rebuild a lot of FC-3 packages for
                CentOS 4 -- these packages and/or the FC-3 branch of
                Fedora Extras is a good stating point for EPEL4
                packages.

Perhaps the listened to the feedback, and/or not everybody was
on-message.  They seem to be very welcoming of rebuild users, and even
complementary of efforts like karan.org.

Phil



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