======== Vision ========
Visions are for people who stand on mountains. System administrators and operators are people just trying to get stuff done and have the pager not go off one night.
========= Mission =========
To build and maintain a curated set of packages built from Fedora releases that help system administrators get their jobs done on Red Hat Enterprise Server and related operating systems.
========= History =========
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is technically a downstream of the Fedora Project. Various RHEL releases have been based off either Red Hat Linux or Fedora releases.
* RHEL 2.1 == Red Hat Linux 7.2 * RHEL 3 == Red Hat Linux 9/Fedora Core 1 * RHEL 4 == Fedora Core 3 * RHEL 5 == Fedora Linux 6 * RHEL 6 == Fedora Linux 12/13 * RHEL 7 == Fedora Linux 18/19
RHEL releases are not the entirety of any Fedora release, but a subset that Red Hat feels best meets the needs of their customers while being long term maintainable by Red Hat. This means that many packages that a customer might need was never included and that customer would need to search for a package somewhere else.
Early on, many of these packages were maintained by various Forges and developers who would put these packages up on websites for others to use as they needed. Sometimes these packages would conflict with either RHEL packages or each other. Othertimes the packages would get updated rapidly to meet the developers needs but not other users. Various people felt that maybe it would be better to build packages from Fedora into an Extras repository that could be used by people.
Initially there was some consensus of packagers joining together, but eventually disagreements emerged on various packaging philosophies which caused EPEL to go one way and others to join at organizations like RPMforge.
================== Initial Policies ==================
The initial packaging philosophy has been that EPEL will never replace a package that is shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Server. The reason for this limitation was that this was the only release that the builders had access to, so other RHEL releases (desktop, etc) could not be easily checked if there was a conflict.
Secondly, updates were to try and not break things. The idea was that system administrators should not need to manually update or change anything to make a process work again after an 'yum update'. [This policy is no longer valid as the philosophy of various software upstreams has become much less open to automated updates]
=================== Organization Rules ====================
Steering Committee ==================
The EPEL Steering Committee (EPSCO) is made up of interested members of the various Red Hat Enterprise Linux rebuild communities. As of 2017-03, the membership consists of 2 members from CentOS, 2 members from Fedora and 1 member who sits in both.
* Stephen Smoogen (smooge) * Kevin Fenzi (nirik) * Brian Stinson (bstinson) * Jim Perrin (Evolution) * Anssi Johansson (avij)
EPEL and the EPEL Steering Committee are chartered by the Fedora Council. The Fedora Council can override any decision made by EPSCO. The size of the EPSCO committee is set by the committee but can be increased or decreased by the Fedora Council.
Each member of EPSCO will confirm their continued membership on the committee once a year. If a member leaves, then the remaining members should canvas for a replacement and at the next general meeting hold a general nomination and in meeting "election" of any candidates. If there are multiple candidates or other complications, an election using the Fedora voting system will be held.
A committee member can be removed by a super plurality vote of the other Steering Committee Members. [For the current committee size that would be 4/5ths.]
Responsibilities ================ EPSCO is charged with meeting regularly to go over current problems and concerns of the EPEL community. It will create policies governing what releases EPEL will build for, what packages may be in the repository, testing and packaging requirements and all other policies needed for the well being of the EPEL community.
Meetings ======== * EPSCO will hold meetings no less than once a month in #fedora-meeting on Wednesdays at 1800 UTC. This time will not change with various country daylight savings. * A quorum of members is 4/5ths of the committee members. * An agenda for each meeting should be published 12 hours before the meeting. * If there is no agenda or not a quorum for meeting, then the meeting will have only one item which is "select items for the next meetings agenda". This will be emailed to the list and requests for * If a voting member can not attend, they can ask for a vote to be retaken either by email or the next meeting. * After meetings, meeting minutes will be posted to the Fedora meeting list. They should be also posted by the chair to the epel-devel mailing list.
Making Decisions ================ In general, decisions by EPSCO should be done by consensus. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Objectives ] In the case, where there is a disagreement by members, a simple majority vote of the committee will decide the matter.
================== General Policies ================== 1. Package Inclusion 2. Package Exclusion 3. Package Removal 4. Package General Updates 5. Package Incompatible Updates 6. Packaging Rules a. RHEL6 b. RHEL7