Happy Halloween (Packages Not In EPEL-8 yet)

It is October, and in the US it means that all the decorations for Halloween are going up. This is a time of year I love because you get to dress up in a costume and give gifts to people. In the spirit of Halloween, I am going to make various packages available in a COPR to add onto the EPEL-8 repositories.

There are a lot of packages which are in EPEL-6 or EPEL-7 but are not in EPEL-8 yet. Some of these may not be possible due to missing -devel, others may just need someone interested in maintaining a branch for EPEL-8, etc etc. In order to try and get a push on this I wanted to see what packages could be built and made ready at some point. I also wanted to make it possible that if you really needed this package, that they could be available.

Important notes:

1. These packages will not be getting updates
2.  These packages will not be something you can file a bugzilla on if they don't work. 
3. If they turn out to be filled with goblins, you have been warned. 
4. If your system starts glowing green and moaning about Elder Gods.. I take no responsibility.

That said, this is how I am building these packages in case you want to do this also:

#Look up package src git repository
$ kinit
$ fedpkg clone {src name}
$ fedpkg srpm
$ mock --chain -r epel-8-x86_64 --localrepo=/home/smooge/not-yet-in-epel8/
# See what packages were needed to build or fix any spec file changes
# if packages needed start chain of packages and fixes
$ copr-cli build not-yet-in-epel8 {src.rpm 1} {src.rpm 2} 
# see what failures occurred.. see if they are fixable.

Currently packages which are not fixable are anything using perl-generators. There are 2 perl-generators in RHEL/CentOS-8 with one of them being a fully built module and one being a pseudo-module. The mock configs use best=1 which causes the fully built module perl to be pulled in.. which is the wrong package as it is built against perl-5.24 and the main perl is perl-5.26. Other packages which will not build are ones which need items which RHEL/CentOS-8 did not ship at all (various -devel and such).

In any case, the copr is at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/smooge/not-yet-in-epel8/ . I will maintain this repository until next March when it like all Halloween themed candy is not even sold at the dollar store anymore.

Attention: Removal of python36 from EPEL-7 on 2019-10-03

With the release of RHEL-7.7, many of the packages for python36 in EPEL were replicated in the release as python3-3.6 packages. The normal pattern when this is seen is to remove the packages from EPEL so that they do not cause problems. However, this did cause problems for users of CentOS-7 who did not have access to the newer packages. Two weeks ago, CentOS-7.7.1908 was released and should have flowed out to users as needed.

So it is time to remove the following src.rpm packages from EPEL:

python36-3.6.8-1.el7.src.rpm
python3-setuptools-39.2.0-3.el7.src.rpm

As they are duplicated by:

python3-3.6.8-10.el7.src.rpm
python3-setuptools-39.2.0-10.el7.src.rpm

We will be removing the python packages on 2019-10-03 so that they should disappear during the repository compose on 2019-10-04. EPEL is a rolling release locked against the latest state of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux repositories. If you are using an older snapshot of RHEL or CentOS, you should sync down versions of the repository and lock particular versions for your use.