EPEL Bug: Bash errors on recent EL-8 systems.

Last week, I got asked about a problem with using EPEL-8 on Oracle Enterprise Linux 8 where trying to install packages failed due to bad license file. I duplicated the problem on RHEL-8 which had not happened before some recent updates.

[smooge@localhost ~]$ repoquery
bash: repoquery: command not found...
Failed to search for file: Failed to download gpg key for repo 'epel': Curl error (37): Couldn't read a file:// file for file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-8.0 [Couldn't open file /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-8.0]

The problem seems to be that the EPEL release package uses the string $releasever for various short-cut strings. Take for example:

[epel-playground]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux $releasever - Playground - $basearch
#baseurl=https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/playground/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=playground-epel$releasever&arch=$basearch&infra=$infra&content=$contentdir
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-$releasever

The problem is that when I wrote new versions of the EPEL-8 repo file, I replaced the old key phrase gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7 with gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-$releasever .  When I tested things with the dnf command it worked fine but I didn't check to see where things like bash completion would show up.

Moving back to the format that EPEL-6 and EPEL-7 used fixes the problem, so I will be pushing an updated release file out this week.  My apologies for people seeing the errors.