[CentOS-devel] Community build services and EPEL8

On 24/07/2019 19:53, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 11:35:39AM -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>> The issue is .. they change the versions out and you then lose that
>> package.  next build it fails with the new one .. what do you do?  The
>> old package is no longer available anywhere.
> 
> One thing that can help here is to not treat the EPEL maintainers as an
> opaque "they". It's actually people you can talk directly to, and who should
> have your concerns as a consumer in mind. You could even become a
> comaintainer of the package.
> 
> 

The issue here is not related to maintainers of a given package, but 
rather one of EPEL policy whereby only the latest release of each 
package is available in the repository. As Johnny correctly mentions, 
this prevents EPEL users from performing a 'yum downgrade' when a 
package breaks as the old version is gone from the repository. Talking 
to the package maintainer or becoming a co-maintainer of a package isn't 
going to fix that.

So the question becomes why would you not want to allow your users the 
ability to yum downgrade a package that may be broken?