[CentOS-devel] freetype package missed in repo

Sat Aug 7 19:47:22 UTC 2021
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 7:52 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:

> While I wish this was how it is handled with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
> (as it is in Fedora for technical reasons), Red Hat has yanked
> packages from RHEL over the years, even in post-release updates.
> Sometimes because they were accidentally pushed, sometimes because
> there was no change (that is what freetype falls into), sometimes
> because they broke things badly (first round of BootHole fixes were
> like that, I think?), and so on. I'm aware of at least one case where
> content was pushed out because it was too late and the documentation
> was updated to indicate to not rely on it because it was going to
> disappear in the next point release. Though it is rare, content does
> disappear from RHEL across minor releases too.

First, *thank you* for using the phrase "point release". That came up
in a previous thread, with a very strange claim that RHEL and CentOS
don't do point releases.

Second, what does "pushed out" mean here? Pushed out to the repos, or
pushed out to a future publication? I'm afraid the word is ambiguous.
And "discontinued" is not the same process as "yanked out of the
published repos".

Can you name any specific RPM that got deleted from the public repos
from Red Hat Linux, RHEL, or CentOS? I'd really like to see or hear of
a specific example, not a "we've done that!". EPEL, yeah, they do that
and it's crazy making when trying to synchronize test environments.
I'd really prefer not to have to tune CentOS mirror tools to aggregate
RPMs only, rather than mirroring all content including "repodata".
That will mean generating repodata on the fly in my local repos and
slowing the publication of an updated repo. I'd anticipated a need to
do some of that to have stabilized internal repos, but don't want to
have to generate repodata as well to catch references to such
"discarded" RPMs.