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

Thu May 20 01:31:48 UTC 2021
Michel Alexandre Salim <michel at michel-slm.name>

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!).

There are multiple unactionable bugs in Bugzilla for EPEL about
uninstallable packages, e.g.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1890414

that ends up with the maintainer telling the reporter to just enable
powertools.

A proof-of-concept we tested in Hyperscale is to just enable PowerTools
in %posttrans:
https://git.centos.org/rpms/centos-release-hyperscale/c/03b6fd490be2571efa60a2c30508aeadf707cdc3?branch=c8s-sig-hyperscale

That way we can make sure that Powertools is already enabled for future
transactions installing packages from our repos, but not potentially
break the transaction itself by changing the set of packages available.

(note: not shipped yet)

But we'd rather not have to do this, and just have Powertools enabled
to begin with. Failing that, have this kludge in epel-release so we get
it for free for our packages that depend on EPEL.

Looking at PowerTools, there's a lot of packages there, esp. in the
Python stack, that I could imagine many Python library or application
shipped in EPEL would be uninstallable if the repo is disabled.

Best regards,

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim
profile: https://keyoxide.org/michel@michel-slm.name
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