System Management Tools and versions

[Michael Stahnke]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 2:18 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-10-02 at 12:56 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> Sadly they use the same ports and like puppet look enough alike at
>> times you think they are the same thing. I would package them up as
>> incompatible with each other... or alternatives of each other.
>
> In the above situatiuon you'd think upstream would want to know they're
> hurting the users they are targeting.
>
> -sv

I'm not sure it's upstream hurting  users.  EPEL won't move the
version of cfengine or puppet (although we have moved puppet in the
past) for the EL4/5 systems.  Thus the choice is either get the latest
from epel and rebuild the latest on the older systems, or the opposite
try and build the old package on the newer EL version.  Either way,
it's a dis-service to everybody involved because the packages are not
in step with each other across distros.  This often leads to people
complaining about EPEL and then rolling their own packages or tarball
or gem installations into their environment.

The reason EPEL normally doesn't move these packages is that they
often times do introduce API/ABI breakage, so I'm not sure what the
best answer is, but I know I would still want all of my servers to be
managed through the same policies and at the same client version so I
have the same features available to everything inside my
infrastructure.

stahnma