[elrepo] Question about EL8 testing lifecycle

[Akemi Yagi]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 5:38 AM Trevor Hemsley <themsley at voiceflex.com> wrote:
>
> On 05/11/2019 12:54, Robert Callicotte wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > How long are packages kept in testing repos before being promoted to
> > "production"?  What criteria have to be met before moving packages out
> > of testing?  My company has a need to verify btrfs capabilities on
> > Centos8.  We are willing to provide feedback and file bug reports
> > against the packages in the testing repos.
>
> BTRFS was marked as deprecated by Red Hat in RHEL 7.4 or  so. There have
> been no updates to the kernel btrfs code in the CentOS 7 kernels since
> the end of 2017 and it is not part of the RHEL/CentOS 8.x kernels at all.
>
> Trevor

There is a good reason why the packages stayed in the testing
repository. :) They were supposed to be removed from there but had
been forgotten. :(

We built the package because of a request to provide kmod-btrfs in
ELRepo's bug tracker earlier this year. However it soon tuned out that
there were problems. Here's an excerpt from the bug entry:

[quote]
Technical issues aside, I feel that we should not go forward with
kmod-btrfs.

I have build the modules using the code taken from the RHEL-8 GA kernel.
Because btrfs is not enabled, RH will not update the code, that is, it is
"frozen". Providing a kmod package based on this code is far from ideal. On
the other hand, backporting the code from a newer kernel and maintaining it
is not something we can offer.

The following article explains quite well why RH decided not to offer the
btrfs file system:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771
[/quote]

Akemi