pexepct is in RHEL and should be dropped from EPEL

[Robert Scheck]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Mike McGrath wrote:
> This is nice and all but EPEL is compatable with RHEL, not the other way
> around.  We, unfortunately, have a one way relationship with RHEL.  They
> decide what goes into RHEL, not us.  It would be nice to have more open
> communcation about these things (I hope that is coming in the future) but
> still, they can decide whatever they want to.

I am not willing to see e.g. duplicity on RHEL < 5.2 broken.

In fact, duplicity is used by RHEL 4 and 5 customers and in the past there
have been several e-mails from Red Hat supporters (or whoever these guys
working at Red Hat are) claiming if something has broken at their customers
machines. I don't want to see breakage again as we can avoid it here by not
dropping the package.

And I ever thought, EPEL is meant to be stable and reliable to Enterprise
customers (even if it isn't supported by Red Hat). If we now really go and
break things, we're getting just another fscked up repository out there...

I'm not questioning, that Red Hat decides what goes into RHEL, but if they
steal packages silently, that must be communicated and it has to be ensured
that upgrading from older versions doesn't break something everywhere (and
it is surely known to Red Hat, that e.g. duplicity from EPEL repository is
in use by RHEL customers).

What happend for pexpect is a lack of quality assurance at Red Hat and a
lack of quality caused by the pexpect downstream package maintainer on Red
Hat side, too.


Greetings,
  Robert