Posted Apr 22, 2010 0:27 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
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An updated memcached is in updates-testing.
updates in EPEL have to spend a certain amount of time in updates-testing before they are released to stable...or enough people give it positive karma.
That's done to help in QA. As an EPEL user you could help by giving it some positive karma in the update system
But I understand the gist of what you are saying. I'll try to state it more exactly.
Because RHEL and EPEL are distinct repositories they have distinct management policies. EPEL tries to provide as coherent an update policy as can be expected given that RHEL's build system is distinct from EPEL's.
Currently there's no way to do a coordinated push, EPEL doesn't get access to RHEL update packages any earlier than RHEL users do. So as a result there will be a lag in EPEL update availability.
Can the volunteer, community run, EPEL do better at serving RHEL customers? I'd like to hear some suggestions on that. For package coordination, its difficult for me to see how. Unless Red Hat is willing to work with us to do coordinated builds prior to RHEL updates going out to the public, the lag will remain.
As an EPEL maintainer, I'd certainly appreciate if customers would let Red Hat know they'd like to see better coordination in updates between RHEL and EPEL. I'd love to see a public discussion between Red Hat, RHEL customers, and EPEL contributors on where the low hanging fruit is.
-jef
RHEL 6 beta version available
Posted Apr 22, 2010 17:21 UTC (Thu) by Banis (guest, #59011)
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I have to apologize for my complaints about EPEL. I did not realize EPEL was not fully managed by redhat. Last time I had a redhat sales guy out he all but claimed the project himself. I assumed redhat was building the packages internally as a way to provide RHEL folks with a broader package set.
RHEL 6 beta version available
Posted Apr 22, 2010 17:46 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
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Well it's certainly nice to know that Red Hat sales team is aware of the work and sees it as a valuable thing to talk about.
It's not surprising that EPEL's role was miscommunicated.
Getting a good idea of internal Red Hat corporate culture perception of Fedora and EPEL can be harder than gauging public perception.
What I would LOVE to see is a high profile public meeting of the minds between Red Hat reps, EPEL maintainers, and a panel of RHEL customers about how a roadmap for making it easier for customers to utilize AND contribute to EPEL and a set of accurate talking points about where EPEL fits in as a value proposition.
There's a lot of room to grow EPEL to better meeting customer needs...but that growth has to either come from sweat-equity from customers themselves contributing to EPEL and shaping it directly or be driven by customer cash channelled through Red Hat to pay for the manhours to build the infrastructure to make RHEL/EPEL synchronization more coherent than it is now. I'm an EPEL maintainer, but I'm not a RHEL customer and so I can't really speak to how EPEL fits into the RHEL customer experience. But what I need is for the conversation to happen in the open. If its always a conversation between a salesperson and a RHEL (potential) customer there's no way I can constructively shape that conversation.