On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: <snip> > They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have organically > grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time. > > For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to > catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and > rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and then > progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and upgraded > to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot > release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is > focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it in > EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed... but > some other related components may be able to recompile fine.] > > Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL is > nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation time > to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it. > Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is > small but the expectation that it will be there is large. > > > >> Tony Schreiner >> _______________________________________________ >> CentOS mailing list >> CentOS at centos.org >> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >> > > I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" from 2003. He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well. The likes of Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy. I really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do ever more. -- J Martin Rushton MBCS