EPEL Metadata and packages

[Michael Stahnke]

A few months/weeks ago there was some discussion on list about knowing
more about the meta-data of EPEL and RHEL.  I think the basic idea was
so that EPEL didn't clobber any packages provided by RHEL or CentOS.

Most of this issues appear to be resovled by making the EPEL provided
packages that are also in Centos have a lower EVR than CentOS provided
ones.  That way RHEL customers can install those packages, and CentOS
ones won't clobber over their base install.

Then, when 5.1 Beta came out, the EPEL contributors saw that some
packages are in 5.1 that were not in 5.0, and thus the EPEL needed to
again revise what packages they were planning to offer as not  to
clobber to stock distro.  This issue hasn't been 100% completed yet,
AFAIK, because 5.1 isn't on our builders (yet, pending CentOS 5.1
release).

My question to the list is, what meta-data information do we really
need to know to be effective?  What use cases do we have in this
space?

Mine are:

* Ensure EPEL doesn't clobber packages provided by RHEL/CentOS.

Questions that I still have.

* What about things like Fedora-DS?  This is in Fedora and is also
offered as a full-support product/channel for RHEL (as RHDS).  Should
this be in EPEL?
* Do we need complete listing of files/packages provided by
RHEL/CentOS somewhere?  What would this be used for and how would it
help packagers/users?
* What about package that obsolete or conflict with base EL packages?
(rsyslog comes to mind).



Any other thoughts on meta-data, or more questions? Please reply.

stahnma