On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 09:18:08PM -0500, Carl George wrote:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 2:54 PM Carl George carl@redhat.com wrote:
Typically EPEL inherits policy from Fedora, diverging when necessary. Here is the corresponding section of Fedora policy.
"All package dependencies (build-time or runtime, regular, weak or otherwise) MUST ALWAYS be satisfiable within the official Fedora repositories."
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#_package_dependen...
We don't consider HA or RS part of the base RHEL distribution (referred to in policy as the "Target Base"). However, I don't think
Well, for 8 and 9... for 7 we do. ;)
we should strictly forbid any dependency on HA or RS packages, because that would require unnecessary duplication of HA/RS packages in EPEL (which is allowed, but shouldn't be required IMO). I suggest a compromise that we can make the policy:
"All EPEL package dependencies (build-time or runtime) MUST ALWAYS be satisfiable within the Target Base or EPEL itself. Weak package dependencies are allowed on packages from additional RHEL channels that are not part of the Target Base, such as the HighAvailability channel."
-- Carl George
We discussed this a bit further at today's EPEL Steering Committee. One alternative that was suggested was to just add the HA and RS repos to the target base list. The initial impact of that would be that several packages already in EPEL8 would become policy violations and would have to be retired.
Yeah, I guess thats pretty anoying in 8 since we didn't start with them. ;(
So, if we did allow weak deps to packages in other non our Base repos, wouldn't that not actually work for the case that started this thread?
ie, say I have a foo-plugin package and foo is in a different non epel base rhel channel and I add a Reccomends for it in epel. People who have the channel enabled would be fine but if someone else installed foo-plugin it would just... not work.
Also could we tell if deps changed? Say I have foo-plugin in epel Reccommending foo, and RHEL drops foo. None of our 'will it install' or broken deps type checks will know that it is now not working. ;(
If we don't add HA and RS to the base epel repos, I guess we could just allow people to build those things they need in epel, but then of course they get to maintain them. ;(
Perhaps instead of a strict rule we could just ask everything that has this issue to get an exception?
Not an easy case.
kevin