On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch> wrote: > >> > >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL has > >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with, amongst > >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon to > >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled. It's just more difficult to > >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as > >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm -ba' > >> .... back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot wasn't a > >> cardinal sin..... > >> > > > > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for. There > > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc. > > > > It is much harder than EL7. > > Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8 is > so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came up. > > In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how it > makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be. > > IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as > possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction. The > result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora) with a > quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with an > unstable and lacking package set. > > Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and software themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for each package. To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL all kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages which are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something like xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires them to run an EL to test. I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take to get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants to do that. This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need 100 packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't want to maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build chain and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task and most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root canal without anesthesia.' > Simon > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -- Stephen J Smoogen.