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

Wed May 26 00:46:06 UTC 2021
Michel Alexandre Salim <michel at michel-slm.name>

On Fri, 2021-05-21 at 06:32 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 3:31 AM Alfredo Moralejo Alonso
> <amoralej at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 2:58 AM Michel Alexandre Salim < 
> > michel at michel-slm.name> wrote:
> > > 
> > > 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.
> > > 
> > 
> > +1 that'd be a nice feature
> > 
> > > 
> > > 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.
> > > 
> 
> Has someone made a feature request to DNF for this on Red Hat
> Bugzilla?
> 
> 
Not that I know of. I want to bring up the related idea of being able
to provide overrides to repo configurations (similar to how systemd let
you override files in /usr/lib/systemd in /etc/systemd) to the next DNF
community meeting; I can bring this up too as an alternative and see
what the core developers think.

Best regards,

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