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

Thu May 14 19:31:40 UTC 2020
Michel Alexandre Salim <michel at michel-slm.name>

Hi,

We're working on validating CentOS 8 for some desktop use cases at work, 
and noticed that after working fine on a machine that's installed 
several months ago, it's now failing on a freshly-installed machine.

Turns out that we need libzstd, which on the previous machine was 
sourced from the EPEL repo, but the epel8 package got retired 3 months 
ago because the package is now in RHEL's BaseOS:

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/

Also, the version in BaseOS (if 8-stream is up to date) is 1.4.2, which 
is older than the last version in EPEL (1.4.4).

Is anyone else in the same situation, and how do you work around it? 
Since EPEL is a sort of "rolling release" does it make sense to just 
track 8-stream if you're using it, or are people resorting to hosting 
these key packages in internal repos?

Thanks,

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
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