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

Fri May 21 18:36:33 UTC 2021
Josh Boyer <jwboyer at redhat.com>

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.

CentOS Stream doesn't have support in the same sense, so PowerTools
being disabled is indeed more friction than may be necessary but some
of the same principles still apply.

josh