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

Thu May 14 23:44:31 UTC 2020
Carl George <carl at redhat.com>

This should normally be an edge case that only occurs during the time
between a RHEL point release and the corresponding CentOS Linux
rebuild.  Historically that usually takes about a month.  As more and
more content is built in CentOS Stream we hope to be able to reduce
that.  In the case of zstd, the EPEL maintainer jumped the gun and
retired the package two months before the RHEL 8.2 release (despite me
asking to retire it at 8.2 GA), so there was a longer gap than
necessary.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1806759

Regarding using CentOS Stream for your use case, be aware that EPEL is
built against RHEL, so it's possible to run into issues where an EPEL
package doesn't work on CentOS Stream.  This is a known issue that we
haven't come to a conclusion yet on how to handle.  On a related note,
EPEL faces similar challenges when RHEL bumps a library soname.  The
maintainer has to choose between updating the package to be compatible
with RHEL and breaking installation on CentOS, or leaving RHEL
installations broken until CentOS catches up.  Anecdotally I think
most maintainers choose the latter.  It's not an exact science.

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 6:23 PM Michel Alexandre Salim
<michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/14/20 1:03 PM, Troy Dawson wrote:
> > On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:32 PM Michel Alexandre Salim
> > <michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
>
> >> https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/zstd/history/dead.package?identifier=epel8
> >>
> >> The package is only in BaseOS in 8.2 though, and CentOS 8.2 is not out
> >> -- the only repo that has it now is 8-stream:
> >>
> >> https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/centos/8-stream/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/
> >>
> >> 8.1.1911 does not have the package:
> >> https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/centos/8.1.1911/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/
> >>
> >
> > There is the EPEL archives.
> > This is fairly recent, but we did a snapshot of 8.1 a bit before 8.2 came out.
> > We plan on doing this for each minor release (7 and 8).
> > Fedora Archives are not on all the mirrors, so it might be a little
> > slower, depending on where you get it from, but at least it's there.
> > https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel/8.1/
> >
> Oh, that's an option, thanks. the archives site tends not to be mirrored
> as widely though, so if we want to use it we might end up mirroring it
> internally.
>
> Per what Paul said (using Stream) I suppose we could also enable the
> Stream repo but set it at a lower priority so we only use packages that
> are not found elsewhere.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Michel Alexandre Salim
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-- 
Carl George