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

Thu May 14 20:03:07 UTC 2020
Troy Dawson <tdawson at redhat.com>

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:32 PM Michel Alexandre Salim
<michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
>
> 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,
>

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/

Troy