On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 14:21, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch> wrote: > > On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 12:46, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch> > wrote: > > > > > EPEL has always been in the need of more people who can volunteer time to > > help maintain and package things. However for the last 5 years (so even > > before EL8) the need has gotten worse: > > 1) The core maintainers who pushed EL6 and EL7 have been increasingly > > 'retired to management' at their respective jobs. > > Are they Red Hat paid people? If so it confirms my impression that EPEL is > not seen very important by Red Hat. > > I am pretty sure that whatever I will say would confirm your impression :). In this case, most of the people I am talking about have been outside of Red Hat volunteers versus Red Hat employees. Many of the original people involved have become VP's, CIO's and other places in upper management in their companies. Others have not but found that real life in other ways got in the way. It happens with any volunteer activity. Does that mean Red Hat never took EPEL seriously? Maybe. But the same can be said of the EPEL users. Most of the rules for package inclusion and the retirement problem I have said are public knowledge brought up over and over through the years and yet most people only 'see' them when EPEL is 'broken' to them. There is a continual forgetting that for the first 2 years of EPEL-7 we didn't have as many packages as we did in EPEL-6.. and that 'EPEL is so broke'. There is an expectation that someone is paid to work on this when no one is. Anyway this rant has had to be revised multiple times so I am ending it here. -- Stephen J Smoogen.