CentOS - Sep 2019 - [PROVENANCE INTERNET] Re: Missing packages in centos8 mirrors or do I miss something?

For those who come across this thread, I've found the exact list of changed
and dropped package between rhel:7 and rhel:8:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/considerations_in_adopting_rhel_8/index#package-replacements_changes-to-packages

Too bad that the "note" column is empty in the dropped package table.
NO word about reason or possible alternatives.
Also too bad that those drops were not advertised before release so developers
could think about migrating there code. That would have helped me a lot if I had
knew that docbook-utils-pdf would be dropped....I would have searched for an
alternative long ago.

Olivier.

?Le 26/09/2019 16:02, ? CentOS au nom de LAHAYE Olivier ? <centos-bounces at
centos.org au nom de olivier.lahaye at cea.fr> a ?crit :

[...]
    -Is there a place where I could read about all dropped packages? I've
searched in redhat changelog and centos and all I could find is a few packages
dropped like NIS related or so.

[...]

On Sep 26, 2019, at 12:13 PM, LAHAYE Olivier <olivier.lahaye at
cea.fr<mailto:olivier.lahaye at cea.fr>> wrote:

Also too bad that those drops were not advertised before release so developers
could think about migrating there code.

Thankfully 7 is supported for another 4 years or so.

On Sep 26, 2019, at 10:13 AM, LAHAYE Olivier <olivier.lahaye at cea.fr>
wrote:
> 
> That would have helped me a lot if I had knew that docbook-utils-pdf would
be dropped....I would have searched for an alternative long ago.
It looks like that package does a combination of xsltproc + FOP.  On EL7, you
can get both with:

    $ sudo yum install fop libxslt

I don?t have an 8 box here to check, but I fully expect that xsltproc is in 8,
being a necessary component of GNOME.  It isn?t on your list of removed
packages.

FOP is on that list, but it isn?t really necessary to have an RPM for it, since
it?s a Java package: just get the distro, unpack it somewhere. and put its ?fop?
wrapper script in the PATH:

    https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

Alternately, you could rebuild Fedora?s package on CentOS 8:

   https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/fop

I expect this difference means this package will move to EPEL eventually, once
someone gets around to it.  EPEL 8 looks rather thin compared to EPEL 7 at the
moment.

You might find my documentation on multi-step DocBook processing helpful:

    https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/dir?name=doc/userman&ci=trunk

The tutorial on that page plus the xsltproc and fo2pdf calls in the Makefile
linked to that page plus the fo2pdf script also linked on that page should
amount to a complete replacement for your existing db2pdf method.

As to why Red Hat abandoned this particular package, I?d guess that this sort of
multi-step processing chain is more common, being more powerful.  For one thing,
it gets you to HTML as well as to PDF.  For another, use of XML technologies
orthogonal to DocBook like XIncludes often require going the step-by-step
processing route.

Also, RHEL8 is purposely paring down much of what goes into core, pushing the
rest off into Software Collections, EPEL, etc.  That was a major point of the
original announcement back in December (?) of last year.