epel-next-all target alias

[LecrisUT]

• epel-all should not contain any epel-next releases. Afaiu if something is packaged on epel it can also be accessed from centos-stream's epel, but not vice-versa?
• Have a epel-next-all alias for all epel-next targets. Seems weird but who knows when it will come in handy. Might as well be thorough 🤷

[FrostyX]

Hello @LecrisUT,
thank you for the feedback.

Maybe I am missing something but I haven't seen epel-next in the output:

>>> from fedora_distro_aliases import get_distro_aliases
>>> aliases = get_distro_aliases()
>>> [x.namever for x in aliases["epel-all"]]
['epel-7', 'epel-8', 'epel-9']

[LecrisUT]

Probably these need to be added. The releases are available on Bohdi, e.g. epel9-next

[FrostyX]

Ah, I read this sentence

epel-all should not contain any epel-next releases.

as a bug report, i.e. epel-all currently shows epel-next releases and shouldn't be.
But this is rather a RFE - we want to add support for epel-next.

Sounds good to me.

[LecrisUT]

With the recent talk about the future of epel, I think instead it would be helpful to have epel-latest and something to distinguish rhel and centos epel-latest targets.

[carlwgeorge]

Afaiu if something is packaged on epel it can also be accessed from centos-stream's epel, but not vice-versa?

CentOS Stream doesn't have it's own EPEL. EPEL Next is not a complete duplication of EPEL; it only contains select updates that are needed to work with libraries that are different between RHEL and CentOS Stream. So RHEL users consume EPEL, and CentOS Stream users consume both EPEL and EPEL Next together. Maybe that's what you were trying to describe, but I just wanted to be clear on the structure. The EPEL docs go into more detail about EPEL Next.

Have a epel-next-all alias for all epel-next targets.

There were only ever two EPEL Next releases, 8 and 9. EPEL 8 Next has already been retired. There will not be any more EPEL Next releases, because we are moving to a new model with EPEL 10. So epel-next-all will just be equal to EPEL 9 Next, and then after 2027-05-31¹ it will be empty. Therefore I'm not sure it's worth implementing an epel-next-all alias.

Maybe I am missing something but I haven't seen epel-next in the output

This is correct, and is a result of Distro.product only matching the id_prefix of FEDORA-EPEL. If you did decide to include EPEL 9 Next in the epel-all alias, you would just have to modify that condition to also include FEDORA-EPEL-NEXT.

With the recent talk about the future of epel, I think instead it would be helpful to have epel-latest and something to distinguish rhel and centos epel-latest targets.

This came up in rpm-software-management/mock#1427. I like the idea, but I'll need some time to think through what aliases are appropriate, the combinations we'll need to account for over time, and what bodhi properties we can use as indicators. For example, EPEL 10 and 11 are going to overlap, and will have different latest minor versions. I'm also cautious about what we label as development.

Footnotes

1. This is the end of the RHEL 9 "full support" phase, which is also the CentOS Stream 9 and EPEL 9 Next EOL. ↩