Oracle Linux 8 EPEL and Errata - only... one?

User_RS49E

So like a ton of folks here, I'm posisbly migrating to Oracle Linux 8 coming from CentOS. Thus far, things look promising.

I have a katello/foreman server, and use that heavily to set up repositories/deployment and patching etc.

So far so good. And I do expect differences in things, for example the number of available packages and errata etc.

I appear to be getting all of the Errata for the base and updates for Oracle Linux 8 itself, but the Oracle EPEL 8 setup is.... worrying me. I see 3,208 packages and... one. ONE errata. This behavior is the same whether I use a local reposync (preferred), or if I try pointing Foreman/Katello directly to Oracle's public yum repo.

Can anyone shed light on what's happening here? Knowing what updates are there and WHY is quite critical.

Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide!

andreas.dijkman

https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/4479352/is-oracle-epel-release-el8-a-direct-replacement-for-epel-release

Have a look here.

Avi Miller-Oracle

So far, we've build 89% of EPEL8 and released 45% of it (compared to 100% built and 97% of EPEL7 released). Our QA team has ~200 EPEL packages in QA at one time, with ~80 packages released per day (by rolling average). Our goal is to achieve 1:1 parity with upstream, we're just still in catch-up mode.

User_RS49E

OK, so EPEL isn't finished yet. That's good to know. But what IS finished, and released (the 45%), why is there no errata? That's my biggest concern. Or, is errata being done later, or....? I am just looking for an answer why the errata isn't there.

Avi Miller-Oracle

Good question. I'll look into it, but it might have to do with the fact that EPEL is an unsupported channel and I'm not sure if we provide errata for our unsupported channels. That's just a guess, though. I'll check with the release team to find out.

User_RS49E

https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/comment/16781801#Comment_16781801

Yes, please let me know what you find out! Thank you.

Opinion side-note: I do find it a bit disturbing however that in order to use EPEL with Oracle Linux, you HAVE to use Oracle's version- yet it's "unsupported". That's a HUGE mixed-message...... Given the demise of CentOS, this is a huge missed-opportunity for Oracle........

Avi Miller-Oracle

You don't have to use our EPEL, you can use upstream if you prefer. It works just fine. Can you point me to the language that made you think otherwise so I can get it changed?

We publish our own build of EPEL for folks who's corporate policy only allows them to install packages signed by a single vendor on a particular server.