[CentOS-devel] Handling packages retired in epel but not yet available in CentOS?

On 5/14/20 4:59 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> It's an ongoing problem. EPEL's decision to show only the most recent
> versions of RPMs, and to trim old RPMs out, is a destabilizing problem
> and why I make hrdlinked snapshots of EPEL using "rsnapshot" for
> internal access to old packages.

So that's a problem we have with Fedora (e.g. hardware regressions 
preventing some hardware from being in the latest kernel, *but* if they 
were not updating often enough, the last known-good version might not be 
available anymore unless you pull from Koji).

But it does not really apply to the EPEL retirement. If a decision is 
made to retire packages for a given branch, it does not matter how many 
versions you keep, they will all be retired, right?

Perhaps having additional metadata in dist-git (e.g. "retire from EL 8.2 
onwards") would allow maintainers to keep building as normal, we can 
publish epel/8-all, epel/8.1, epel/8.2 etc. repos where the first repo 
has all packages, and the others have symlinks to 8-all but filtering 
out the retired packages?

But that won't work if there are ABI incompatibilities... so yeah, 
overall I think the best solution is to just try and get CentOS releases 
out of the door sooner rather than later.

Or have a "purgatory" repo where packages retired in EL 8.2 get to live 
until, say, a month after CentOS 8.2 is GA? Again, seems like too much work.

In our case, hopefully this is a one-off (it's because we deploy 
RPM-with-zstd internally).

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
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