On Thu, 18 Nov 2021 at 16:18, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 11:43 AM Brian Stinson <brian at bstinson.com> wrote: > > > The discussion about the interpretation of the EOL announcement is a good one, we should keep that going. The Devel repo is a slightly different topic though. > > > > If you remember how the Devel repo was meant to work, it was meant to contain -devel packages that we've accepted into one of the core repos in the middle of a minor-release: https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOS8/UnshippedPackages > > Your description does not match the Wiki you cite, which says > *nothing* about "-devel" packages, only about "packages". And the > concept of "accepted into the core repos" is a very peculiar one when > the "quota-devel" repo is used for compiling critical system tools > like "samba-client-libs", which in turn is woven into sssd. That.... > messed with my work on Samba. I strongly dislike having to work my way > around this by a different means once a year, and I hope that the > "Devel" repo will never be needed again. > I am saying the below as the person who spent a year lobbying for the Devel repo and now the cause of this ruckus. When EPEL was getting started, we needed various packages which were not in Code Ready Builder/Powertools. Adding them to Code Ready Builder takes time and could be delayed for various reasons. The CentOS koji was not able to handle large amounts of download traffic and so was not available. In the end, a compromise was worked out where various packages were hand pulled out of koji and put in a devel repo which could allow for those EPEL packages to get the headers needed. The hackiness of this should have been obvious over the fact that after 8.3 came out the Devel repo still had old packages for a long time. The same after 8.4 came out and it was empty until a rebuild caused the need to get some items in it. With the end of CentOS Linux in ~40 days, relying on someone to hand-populate the repo for a short period makes no sense. Instead, I would highly recommend that people either: 1. Try to work out a way to have the package in EPEL using the better method Troy is using versus my hack 2. Use Alma or Rocky Devel repo as they are fairly complete and will be supported after 2021-12-31. 3. If (and only if) this works for your deployed workload, use the CentOS Stream method outlined by Brian Stinson. [I understand nearly everyone's pain on this.. and my apologies for paving this part of the road to Heck with my good intentions.] -- Stephen J Smoogen. Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle. -- Ian MacClaren