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

Thu May 20 02:17:50 UTC 2021
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

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.

Enabling it by default is available to you as a local configuration
option: as you expand a network and go to system management tools like
ansible rather than the expensive to set up and painful to manage RHN
or spacewalk system, you may wish to automate its activate it by
default or write '--enablerepo=PowerTools'' into your dnf installation
scripts.