> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 7:31 AM Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter <simon.matter@xxxxxxxxx>
>> 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
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > CentOS mailing list
>> > CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
>> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stephen J Smoogen.
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
>
> 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.
>
> Tony Schreiner
Both Debian and Fedora have a much larger package base and try to keep
those alive step by step.
EL on the other side has a very limited, supported package set and
therefore a lot of packages needed to build a lot of packages are just
missing.
It's my impression that most development power goes into the limited base
system and cloud, container and all the newer fancy stuff.
Simon
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