[CentOS-devel] Looking for input from EPEL

On 08/31/2010 09:52 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> With the differences between EL-6 architectures we are finding that we
> need to build things for PPC or i386 that Upstream x86_64 has.

This isnt really new to EL6, we ran into this issue with EL5 as well and 
have decided to publish all rpms into the main single distro repo( os + 
updates ).

Is there any reason why we should change that policy now ?

> people not wanting to have a different RPM spec file from upstream we
> will end up with an x86_64 package set too.. which as the good old Fat
> Controller would say "causes confusion and delay". So in order to
> satisfy various factions we are looking at add a COST to EPEL so that
> it would be higher than the default 1000 (say 1100).

Cost itself wont solve the problem, there would need to be a blacklist 
at the repo end to make sure that rpms are never published that have a 
higher EVR than whats in the main distro. Even if the pkg does not exit 
for the same arch upstrem.

Ofcourse, the fact that epel will end up rebuilding packages that are in 
rhel core is going to be an interesting twist - specially when pkg 
maintainers are different.

> What I would like to know is if this would affect CentOS-6, SciLin-6
> or other repos so that we can deal with it now versus later. [And as

The only real issue would be when packages overlap, and what is the best 
way to address that is something that would need to be handled at the 
third party repo side of things ( so not Red Hat or CentOS ). We are 
already working towards having a public build queue that exposes a json 
interface, so automating stuff around that should not be hard for anyone.

> much as I would like to go with repotags.. that has been seen as a
> non-starter.]

Is'nt epel the only repo not using a repo specific tag ?

- KB