On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 14:55 +0100, Robert Scheck wrote:
On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> It would be good to document best practises when spec files are reused
> in RHEL as is going to happen repeatedly so that both sides understand
> what is to be done. Someone interested in not seeing things like this
> should volunteer.
Best practise is, if packagers would know, how packaging and ENVRA works -
which seems not known to all packagers (independent whether Fedora or Red
Hat at this case).
My previous e-mail explains correct, why not bumping release of ENVRA is
broken in such a case (which also would automagically cause %changelog to
get silent rpmlint) and why it has to be fixed by Red Hat and why we at
EPEL can't fix or solve it completely. So if somebody does not understand
that, he/she shouldn't be a RPM packager at all, sorry.
I agree completely.
What should be done now is an increase of the release version in RHEL
( / CentOS), in order to get all installations from EPEL to update to
the Red Hat version.
What is a completely different question, however, is what to do with the
packages in EPEL. If the release in RHEL is incremented, and the package
is updated in EPEL afterwards to a higher EVR, the RHEL version will be
replaced with the EPEL version.
As a EPEL package maintainer, branching versions for different RHEL
releases (Updates) would be a humongous task, as some components need
special tweaks to work. Also, running an old release poses a security
threat.
Overlapping packages should be removed from EPEL, once a higher EVR is
available in RHEL. We shouldn't even think about people who don't want
to update to the newest RHEL release; if they need something from EPEL,
they can compile the srpms theirself.
--
Jussi Lehtola <jussi.lehtola(a)iki.fi>