[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2012, Alan Bartlett wrote:

> The discussion, here, is about EPEL. Because they do not tag their
> packages and -- thank you Russ for providing some examples

I wrote the tool to 'see' potentials for over-writes after 
their mailing list had a thread that raised the concern.  It 
became clear that as they were not systematically looking 
broadly enough for potential conflicts to suit my tastes. 
There are many more than the ones I posted

As a result (and actually before), the only way I consider 
adding EPEL as a binary archive, is with a blanket 'exclude', 
and per package 'includepkgs' settings. I am fine with using 
it as a source of SRPMs for local custom solutions for 
customers where I control the dependencies and over-writes, by 
and large (there are some exceptions)

Your tastes may vary, but the idea of adding the repository 
and letting a admin 'choose' to enable it will, to my 
thinking, result in people adding it fully enabled and without 
care.  We see this in IRC all the time, that people post 
pastebins that have EPEL, and rpmforge, and ART, and more, all 
turned on with no awareness of why "CENTOS is broken!!"

Not a good idea.  Who needs the reputational damage?  Not 
CentOS

-- Russ herrold