[CentOS-devel] The SCL wiki page contents and confusing SCL situation

[James Hogarth]

Hi,

I thought I'd start an article on my personal blog on the various options
for newer PHP (in particular), python, ruby etc options in CentOS -
particularly given some of the base packages in EL6 have now passed EOL
upstream and consequently some applications (eg OwnCloud) now have minimal
dependencies greater than in base.

What I found on initial looks to SCL was at best confusing and in areas
outright misleading, with help needed from Dominic in #centos-devel to work
through the present SCL situation.

Doing a general Google search (or the @scl keyword in #centos) will take
someone to here:
https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL

This refers to an old centos-release-SCL package which is still in the
repos and would direct the user to unmaintained old versions.

The correct package is actually centos-release-scl ... yes just the case
needs to change.

The documentation for centos-release-scl stuff (ie the CentOS SCL SIG
stuff) is pretty much nonexistent for a user needing a newer version of a
package. These pages are very CentOS developer focused and not really
useful for the end user:

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SCLo
https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/SCLo/CollectionsList

Then once the right package is installed the user can see there is php54,
php55 and rh-php56 packages but it's not clear why the difference in the
naming and there's nothing that highlights to someone that if they want to
use php55 or rh-php56 they'll need to handle a migration to rh-httpd24 as
well.

I'd suggest the first step is to have centos-release-scl obsolete
centos-release-SCL so that users are not left on an unmaintained repository.

Then as I gather data for my article I'd really like to flesh out and
improve the 'user facing' SCL wiki page.

Thoughts on this?

James
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