On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 08:18, Tony Schreiner <anthony.schreiner at bc.edu>
wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 7:31 AM Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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.'
> >
>
> Does package building for debian and derivatives not run into this same
> issue of interdependency? Is it because they have more packages to begin
> with?
> Not judging, I'm curious.
>
>
They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have organically
grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.
For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and then
progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and upgraded
to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it in
EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed... but
some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]
Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL is
nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation time
to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers
is
small but the expectation that it will be there is large.
> Tony Schreiner
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>
--
Stephen J Smoogen.