[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 5:44 PM,  <me at tdiehl.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Sep 2012, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>> On 09/13/2012 06:42 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Karanbir Singh<mail-lists at karan.org>  wrote:
>>>> hi guys,
>>>>
>>>> One bit of feedback at LinuxCon this year from people was that we should
>>>> ship epel with a lower barrier to entry. And I have mixed feelings about
>>>> that. But I wanted to know what everyone else thinks about :
>>>>
>> But for those who do not have prior
>> knowledge, like it or not, yum install epel-release is way easier than
>> to follow "go read our wiki page on adding 3rd party repos and pay
>> attention to priorities". Yes, I know, they should read/learn. But
>> helping them by excluding the "hunt for epel-release and install it"
>> part will not hurt.
>
> And yum install http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7
> is hard?
>
> Googling "install epel-release" gets the following url:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_install_the_packages_from_the_EPEL_software_repository.3F
>
> If they can find IRC they should be able to follow enough directions to
> google as above.
>
> Oh and in case it is not clear I am in the do nothing camp.
>
> Regards,
> Tom


We must immediately stop drawing a distinction between "those idiots"
and "the knowledgeable people" because it has nothing to do with that.
 Anyone who thinks that needs to grow up and realize that making life
easier has nothing to to with "dumbing things down", but in fact is
the very point of advancing technology.

The process of automating installation is always about eliminating one
step here or there.  I could easily say that following an install
document using copy/paste is easy enough and that scripting or
automating via puppet/chef is just a waste of time and only coddles to
the idiots who can't follow instructions.  A few years ago some of you
might have agreed, but not today.


The "do nothing" approach has absolutely no advantage.  There is no
one forcing you to use the packages.  The only people it gains are the
ones who want to use it, and the only people it hurts is .. nobody.
It's up to the CentOS release team if they want to keep the packages
up to date.  Otherwise, it affects nobody else negatively.

As is typical of a discussion like this, everyone is ignoring the
second part of the request, which is discussing the standards that
should be used when deciding to include a repo in the repository.

I typically use priorities for all 3rd party repos, but there is no
simple way to configure that directly via a package install.  It seems
that the inclusion of any 3rd party repos would have to solve that
problem somehow.  Are there any yum modules that provide protection
and don't require manual editing of yum repo files?

Another idea is something along the lines of the cr repo, where there
is a package in the extras repo that will enable a "3rd-party" repo
which actually contains the -release packages.  The "3rd-party"
package could have some requirements of it's own, such as
yum-priorities, etc...  Admittedly that's a bit convoluted, and may
not make things easier, but it's a way of trying to bring in other
packages without modifying the original -release packages.


❧ Brian Mathis