Why are EPEL python packages getting renamed?

Someone joined the irc.freenode.net #epel channel on early Saturday (2016-12-10) and asked:

[2016-12-10-07:33 UTC]  hi, it seems that python-pip was renamed to python2-pip, is there any documentation available why that choice was made?

By the time I got to IRC (12 hours later), they had left so I am going to try and answer them here. . Python packages in EPEL are made like every other package from Fedora. Currently Fedora is working on finishing making Python3 their default python and moving the older python to python2 naming. In doing so python packages are either being named python2 or python3 depending on which chain they are built against. This is going to have an effect on the names of Python packages in EPEL for EL6 and EL7 as the changes occur. For more information on Fedora Python packaging guidelines please see the following link.

Puppet not coming back to EPEL EL-6

I made a grievous mistake in my previous blog post about the removal of Puppet Software and would it be coming back to EL-6. At the time, I misread someone's IRC comment and thought it was. However after a couple of days of not seeing any updated builds in Koji, I decided to check and found out I was wrong. The maintainers (and upstream) will not be putting puppet back in EL-6 for a couple of good reasons:

1. The version that was in EL-6 was actually a very old version no longer maintained or updated by PuppetLabs. 
2. Puppetlabs maintains a set of packages which will work on EL-6 distributions and focuses their attention there for problems and bug fixes.

So what to do? The upstream recommends that users of puppet use the one available from from Puppetlabs called puppet collections. The documentation on setting up the repository and using it are pretty clear, but for security sakes I will add a couple of steps.

$ sudo -i
# mkdir /root/puppet; cd /root/puppet
# wget https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-pc1-el-6.noarch.rpm

if you want to try and check the signature before installing you can add the following steps:

# wget https://yum.puppetlabs.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-puppetlabs
# rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-puppetlabs
# rpm -K puppetlabs-release-pc1-el-6.noarch.rpm 

however this does mean altering the rpm database before you check to see if it is ok.

# yum localinstall puppetlabs-release-pc1-el-6.noarch.rpm

if you are wanting a local copy of the repository for other boxes to install from you can use 'reposync'. For more on configuration management, you might also want to look at or join the CentOS Configuration Management Special Interest Group

[UPDATE: The old packages for puppet are still in Fedora Koji at http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=609117 ]
[UPDATE2: For better instructions on how to carefully check GPG headers of packages before you install them willy nilly, try the following:
http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2008/08/gnupg-few-minutes-on-using-detached-and.html ]