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

On Sat, May 22, 2021 at 4:38 AM Phil Perry <pperry at elrepo.org> wrote:
>
> On 21/05/2021 19:36, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 10:18 PM Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:32 PM Michel Alexandre Salim
> >> <michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> At the Hyperscale SIG, one of the repos we ship (centos-release-
> >>> hyperscale-hotfixes, which we use to override modular content we need
> >>> to fix as MBS is not available to SIGs) depends on EPEL (because the
> >>> packages there, for example libvirt, needs dependencies in EPEL).
> >>>
> >>> EPEL's Quickstart recommends enabling codeready-builder on RHEL8, and
> >>> the corresponding powertools repo on CentOS 8:
> >>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#Quickstart
> >>>
> >>> Could we possibly just enable powertools by default? CRB is on by
> >>> default in RHEL8 UBI containers (but weirdly not in the related CentOS
> >>> Stream containers!).
> >>
> >> Good luck with that. Disabling Powertools by default is a RHEL
> >> upstream behavior. The segregation of these tools and the disabling of
> >> them by default is one of the aspects of RHEL 8 and CentOs 8 that
> >> profoundly irritate me, they've so far served no useful purpose and
> >> only caused confusion. They do reduce the metadata download
> >> requirements somewhat for ordinary yum updates, but that's a distinct
> >> issue.
> >
> > For whatever it's worth, CodeReady Builder is disabled by default in
> > RHEL 8 because it is a repository that contains content that is not
> > supported at runtime in production.  Enabling it by default would
> > immediately lead to customers depending on unsupported content without
> > any awareness of that dynamic.  We want to make sure they're set up to
> > use supported content from the start.
> >
>
> Isn't that the same reason Red Hat cites for not including the missing
> -devel packages in RHEL? If so, I see no reason not to ship them in
> CodeReady Builder as unsupported, and not enabled by default.

No, that is not the same reason.

As for why we don't ship everything in CodeReady Builder by default,
there are a number of different reasons.  One of the more nuanced
things that come into play is that RHEL provides Application
Compatibility Guidelines (ACG) that we adhere to.  There are some
scenarios where providing a -devel package in CodeReady Builder would
have ACG implications.

josh