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Apologies and So Forth
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First, I would like to apologize for the delay in getting this post
done. I really didn't realize the amount of energy the trip would take
from me and how fuzzy brained I was for a week afterwords. Second, I
would like to thank the Open Source and Standards (OSAS) group at Red
Hat for sponsoring me that week. I believe I got a lot of things done
and that we can work on getting Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux
(EPEL) moving forward in some direction. Third I would like to thank
everyone who took the time to talk to me at one of these places to
tell me about what they were able to do with EPEL and what they were
no longer able to use it for.
One of the items that people brought up a lot was that they felt
conversations about fixing/growing/changing EPEL have become a broken
record. Various things are said at many conferences by various people,
but nothing ever gets done on this to the point that they feel they
have been lied to. After succumbing to the fuzzy headed "what did I
say yesterday?" for a week after flying back, I think that most of
these broken promises have come up from jet-lag and people
overload. If it hadn't been that I had people from IBM, CERN, and
various other groups bring this up over and over again.. I may have
forgotten just as well. In any case, I am going to try and outline
every item that I wrote down on many pages of notes in this blog. If I
have forgotten some point that you wanted me to bring up, please send
me an email so that I can make sure it is dealt with.
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Things EPEL is doing well
===========================
The primary user of EPEL packages are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or
a clone like CentOS or Scientific Linux) version 6 with a slowly
shrinking set of EL-5 users. The audiences that use EPEL are very
diverse. Everything from large organizations with strict audit
controls to fast moving startups which have to work with the large
organizations as their customers to the university trying to do some
experiments to match things done in other organizations.
Many users brought up the fact that the win of EPEL is that it is a
low energy move to get packages from Fedora rebuilt for an Enterprise
environment. The fact that the package spec files had been vetted and
tested in Fedora made for less chances of conflicts or configuration
problems that crept into their own spec files or ones they got off the
internet from various groups. Things EPEL is not doing well in
This is going to be a rather long list of items that came up. Some of
them conflict with each other but that is mainly due to the fact that
the customers are so diverse.
* The packaging guidelines for each EPEL version are not clear. This
is mainly due to the fact that they are usually based off of older
versions of Fedora (Fedora-6 for EPEL-5, Fedora-12 for EPEL-6, and
Fedora-18 for EPEL-7) that may conflict with each other or with how
things are being done in current EPEL.
* EPEL does not have a regular release structure like Fedora and RHEL
have. There isn't an EPEL-5.11 channel with an epel-updates-5.11
where updates are available. Because of various repository
limitations, this means that directories aren't able to keep
multiple old copies so downgrades when things do break aren't easy.
* EPEL promises to keep things stable and only update for fixes, but
this is only done on a few packages where others get upgraded to and
fro. There does not seem to be much "steering" or "release
engineering" of what is in the trees.
* EPEL only covers part of Enterprise Linux (the Server product) but a
lot of packages are for the Workstation but there is no way to see
when things replace/conflict with them. [People believe that we
build against the equivalent of CentOS-5/6/7 versus a subchannel.]
* EPEL sometimes has weird breaks between releases. The git in EPEL-5
is newer than what is in EL-6 in a way that was breaking
repositories when pushes were done from EL-5 systems. [People
believe there is a promise that such changes are tested against.]
* EPEL packages disappear. If there is no maintainer packages are
retired but if someone is re-building out the EL-5 hosts.. they need
that package to be available. [People believe there is a promise
that packages will be always available.]
* From various people who were (or former) EPEL maintainers: packages
in EPEL are the most complained about. If they can't update the
package in EPEL, they get complaints about it being too old and they
may end up having a newer version available for what they need to do
anyway. If they do update the version, they get complaints that they
broke someone because they needed some old version. Most of the
complaints usually are the worst kinds ( off-hand death threats (why
don't you die in a fire) etc etc).
==============================
Things people wanted in EPEL
==============================
There were various things that people were wanting in EPEL that
weren't really breakages because they don't exist yet.
* Enable 'alternative' architectures. There were requests from people
about CentOS-i386 and CentOS-arm (for the Raspberry Pi2 in schools)
with no vision on how those would be enabled.
* Enable more packages with shorter lifetimes. One of the things that
multiple sites were doing was rebuilding all of a Fedora release for
their internal mirrors to supplement all of the things that EPEL
didn't have in it. Why can't there be an EPEL-rawhide where all of
these packages are built but no 'promises'?
* Is it possible to have a branch management system where packages get
updated regularly? Say either whenever Fedora moves to a new release
or Red Hat updates to the next branch (6.7->6.8, 7.2->7.3)
* Could packages in EPEL be tested in the CentOS continuous
integration infrastructure as part of the autokarma testing?
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Conclusions
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I don't think anything above is new to people who have been
contributing to EPEL in the last ~10 years. A lot of the problems are
ones that were brought up in the beginning as we tried to square the
circle of differing use cases. However, I wanted to catalogue them
here and then make a promise that I will do my best to figure out ways
to solve them by FOSDEM 2017 in some form or another.
As I said at the beginning of the post, I believe that people had
other complaints and suggestions. If I forgot or miswrote, my
apologies and I will correct.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.