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

Fri May 21 00:58:19 UTC 2021
Michel Alexandre Salim <michel at michel-slm.name>

On Wed, 2021-05-19 at 22:17 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
Yeah, we're exploring that option since we'll soon have Hyperscale
instalation media anyway.

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.

Best regards,

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