On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch>
wrote:
> >>
> >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in
EPEL has
> >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with,
amongst
> >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an
addon to
> >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled. It's just more
difficult to
> >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm
as
> >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive
'rpm -ba'
> >> .... back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot
wasn't a
> >> cardinal sin.....
> >>
> >
> > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for. There
> > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.
> >
> > It is much harder than EL7.
>
> Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8 is
> so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came up.
>
> In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how it
> makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be.
>
> IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as
> possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction. The
> result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora) with a
> quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with an
> unstable and lacking package set.
>
>
Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those
problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and software
themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a
larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for
each package.
To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL all
kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages which
are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something like
xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages
needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires them
to run an EL to test.
I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take to
get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand
packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the
RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in
Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants to
do that.
This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need 100
packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't want to
maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build chain
and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task and
most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root
canal without anesthesia.'
> Simon
>
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--
Stephen J Smoogen.