RFC: Rethinking EPEL at FUDcon Lawrence 2013

[Troy Dawson]

On 12/05/2012 08:47 AM, Greg Swift wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Ken Dreyer <ktdreyer at ktdreyer.com
> <mailto:ktdreyer at ktdreyer.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Greg Swift <gregswift at gmail.com
>     <mailto:gregswift at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > I'm personally inclined to lean toward the concept I was pushing
>     in the
>     > thread discussing multiple versions [1].  I'd imagine that a 'api
>     stable'
>     > repo and a 'rolling' repo would be less support effort than
>     attempting to
>     > manage >8 repositories per major release and the security updates
>     that need
>     > to be applied on older version.
> 
>     My main concern with multiple EPEL repos is that users will be in a
>     worse condition security-wise. Many users will download an application
>     from the "api stable" repo, but they will not realize that no one is
>     doing backports any more, because all the interested EPEL maintainers
>     left that behind to focus on the "rolling" repo.
> 
>     The analogy that comes to my mind is Fedora: What if we kept old
>     Fedora releases going back all the way to Fedora 6 open to maintainers
>     to patch on a voluntary basis, and we never really announced EOL for
>     any Fedora release? Fedora users would have to know enough to keep
>     jumping along with whatever's maintained.
> 
>     It seems to me that we have to choose between occasional instability
>     and insecurity. I'd rather EPEL's reputation err on the side of
>     instability rather than insecurity.
> 
> 
> I can back that line of thought.  Plus providing 1 path means less
> change! :)
> 
> 
>     > So, unless someone wants to turn EPEL into a paid service, #1 is out
>     > (hey...  thats an interesting concept...)
> 
>     Maybe money does have to enter the picture at some point. Corporations
>     should commit to pay salaries for more developers to do EPEL backports
>     if it's important to their businesses.
> 
> 
> So... anyone got any motivation in pushing a product internally @ Red
> Hat that does this? :)
> 
> 
> Also.... I hadn't mentioned it before on here, because in general
> mentioning tends to mean you have to do it and I don't really have the
> cycles available.  But as of this morning I figured I'd float the
> concept anyways.
> 
> What would it take to basically have a yum plugin would check a
> 'notification' feed (something simple like rss or atom) about a specific
> repository.  Notifications found on that feed would throw messages in
> the yum output and /var/log/messages.  This feed could provide notices
> like 'Hey, this version is deprecated and insecure, you need to
> update'.  An extension of this might be that it marks the package as an
> 'exclude' if it can't just be updated without interference.  This would
> allow a notification method, and a way for users to not get an update if
> its going to break them, but also allowing the main page to just
> continuously be updated.
> 
> Then this package could possibly be a required package from the
> epel-release package.
> 
> -greg

Not volunteering at the moment because I don't have the cycles, but I
really like that idea.
Something similar, except opposite, of the security plugin.  If a
package has the "breakable update" option set, then don't update it
unless they do the "--reallyupdate" option.  But also give them a nag
that says the package has an update.

Troy