[CentOS-devel] Enabling PowerTools by default? (and proof-of-concept alternative)

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 1:18 AM Jack Aboutboul <jack at almalinux.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On May 20, 2021, at 20:58, Michel Alexandre Salim <michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
> >
> > My pipe dream (doable, but I probably want to wait for the DNF ->
> > microdnf rewrite dust to settle) is to be able to declare dependencies
> > between repos.
> >
> > e.g.
> >
> > epel-release recommends (repo(PowerTools) if centos-stream-repos)
> > => this signals to DNF that, hey, when epel-release is installed, flip
> > PowerTools on, and if likewise PowerTools recommends another repo, it
> > gets transitively enabled as well.
> >
> Not for nothing but this would probably make alot of people happy. Especially those running their own local repos for stuff that need to pull things in from elsewhere.

Don't you dare! The dependency resolutions really need to be done on a
package by package basis, especially since it's very difficult to
predict which third party repos any one repo might require. Compounded
by the complexity and instability of "Modular" packaging, it's
especially likely to break python RPM dependencies. Older python
modules can be incompatibile with newer modules released *after* they
were published and are unlikely to be patched in time to refine those
dependencies. Been there, done that, yesterday trying to resolve
dependencies to build an awxkit RPM.

I can't force people to avoid sweeping changes, but it would be yet
another reason not to use CentOS 8 as predictably unstable and
deployment fracturing.