[CentOS-devel] Reasoning behind RHEL8 packages without corresponding -devel?

Sun Oct 20 14:33:59 UTC 2019
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 8:24 AM Alexander Bokovoy <abokovoy at redhat.com> wrote:
>

> >A distribution vendor have of course the right to limit the support
> >but this specific case (missing devel rpm) leaves a bad taste on
> >customers side and results in a bad experience. IMHO this experience
> >contradicts RH's strategy pushing this platform ...
> I think a productive way would be to file bugs asking to get the
> packages in, with explanation why they are needed and how they would be
> used.
>
> I did the same for quota-devel already -- its lack doesn't allow us to
> test the quota-related functionality in Samba CI upstream, for example.
>
> --
> / Alexander Bokovoy
> Sr. Principal Software Engineer
> Security / Identity Management Engineering
> Red Hat Limited, Finland

Do feel free to play with my backports of Samba, with quota-devel
compiled into a local yum repository for local builds with CentOS 8 or
RHEL 8, over at https://github.com/nkadel/samba4repo . The process of
porting it to CentOS 8 was complicated by Red Hat's decision to
activate modularity in an awkwardly integrated fashion, and requires
resetting the mock configurations to "best=0", documented at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1756681 .And I've
published pull requiest for that to the mock developers.

This decision to stop including the devel package means I've had to
include a local build tree for "quota" in my Samba development
environment, and it's likely to break my development environment when
quota gets even a minor version update and my locally published
quota-devel package no longer matches. I don't want to waste my time
on this sort of thing, and I do pay for RHEL licenses. I hope that
CentOS elects not to emulate this silliness and puts the quota-edevel
package in the "PowerTools" channel.