[CentOS-devel] Shipping an EPEL release

Thu Sep 13 19:32:14 UTC 2012
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis+centos at betteradmin.com>

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 11:32 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 :
>
> 1) Shipping epel-release in CentOS-Extras, so its installable, usable
> out of the box.
>
> 2) Shipping epel-release in the distro itself, with the epel repos's
> enabled=false. This is the option that most people seem to want, but I
> am least keen on.
>
> 3) do nothing, leave things as they are.
>
> Ofcourse, if we do either (1) or (2) we would need to set some sort of a
> baseline standard that allows other repo's to be included as well ( as +
> if they meet the baseline standard )
>
> regards,
> Karanbir Singh


There seems to be a chorus of "do nothings", but that clearly does not
solve the problem.  The point of technology is to make life easier
(and wanting an easier life does not make one lazy or clueless), and
since EPEL so frequently used, it stands to reason that including it
does make sense.

The description of the Extras repo is:
   > items that provide additional functionality to CentOS without
   > breaking upstream compatibility or updating base components
Wouldn't this package meet that description?

To Johnny's point, it seems like it should just be the package
directly from the EPEL project, unmodified.  But it brings up another
point that using the yum-priorities plugin is often recommended, and
that would not be part of the stock epel-release rpm either.

This may not be a big issue for EPEL, since they aim to "never
conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux
distributions", but maybe this becomes part of the baseline standard
for CentOS.


❧ Brian Mathis