EPEL Update?

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Hi,

OT for this list, but maybe I can get some pointers – how hard is it to get some packages updated in EPEL? The project web site sends you from link to link, and the ML web interface is horrible. No interest here to become a package maintainer or regular contributor.

I have taken it upon myself to rebuild MATE from Fedora 29, seeing that the current EPEL-7 packages are four revisions behind. Also updated a few packages to their latest upstream version.

9 thoughts on - EPEL Update?

  • If you have interest in being a package maintainer or regular contributor it can be very hard to get packages updated. EPEL is trying to mainly deal with people who want long term supported package sets with limited manpower to do so.

    If you are needing the latest upstream versions… I would say you are probably going to need to maintain these things yourself. As much as you want/need the latest MATE or some other item there are other people who don’t and EPEL package maintainers can’t satisfy both demands.

  • Greg Bailey writes:

    Thanks, I’m unfamiliar with this repo. Looks like the owner is the same guy who built the F29 mate packages (1.20).

  • The problem is that the current version of Mate in the EPEL repos prevents updating from 7.5 to 7.6. There is a dependency problem with libgtop.

    For example trying to update marco gives you.

    Resolving Dependencies
    –> Running transaction check
    —> Package marco.x86_64 0:1.16.1-3.el7 will be installed
    –> Processing Dependency: libgtop-2.0.so.10()(64bit) for package:
    marco-1.16.1-3.el7.x86_64
    –> Finished Dependency Resolution Error: Package: marco-1.16.1-3.el7.x86_64 (epel)
               Requires: libgtop-2.0.so.10()(64bit)
     You could try using –skip-broken to work around the problem

    The same dependency holds for several mate packages.

    So either hold back on the update until mate is updated or build it yourself are the choices..

    Regards,

    Tony.

    —
    Tony Molloy
    Home

  • Using EPEL-testing also solves the problem in many cases, might also be able to build a temporary compat library package for old version of libgtop until MATE packages are updated.

  • The epel-testing repo resolves these dependencies, so include it when updating and things should be ok — I just updated a mate desktop system with no issues (it pulled about half a dozen items from
    -testing).

  • Yep I’m just running up a VM to test the epel-testing solution.

    Regards,

    Tony
    —
    Tony Molloy
    Home

  • Just one more data point: I use Mate on C7, and just updated my new-to-me
    (old)laptop, and after the upgrade it boots up great, but even though I select Mate on the login screen, all I get is the gray screen (an image that looks like gray snow), a movable mouse pointer, and nothing else.

    Per above postins, I DID enable epel-testing before doing “yum update”.

    If I (from that gray screen) do CTRL-ALT-BKSP I can log in on Gnome and it works fine. if I could only figure out how to use Gnome. (why do people like that thing? Go figure.)

    so I restored my dd backup from just prior to the update and am now back where I started.

    This laptop’s installation is the most disposable of my C7 machines, so\
    I’m not likely to upgrade any of the others until problems such as this
    (and the RAID1 problems I’ve been reading about, and various Nvidia-related problems) can be avoided when upgrading.

    I ‘preciate all the work you CentOS people do, I know you’re somewhat limited by what RH hands you, so THANKS!

    Fred