I am building a new workstation deployment profile as the previous one here was CentOS 7 and we chose to go Rocky 9.
However the astronomy packages we provide have a dependency on plplot-libs hierarchy and this was in EPEL 8 but isn’t in EPEL 9 - it is in Fedora 38/39
Generally speaking what do people do when a package is not available in 1) base repo 2) epel or crb 3) some other 3rd party repo
I would like to avoid having to download from github and compile it myself but maybe I’m just being a wimp.
I was considering trying to add a foreign repo - i.e. a fedora repo - as some packages which don’t have any dependency as described above and are only available in fedora I have just downloaded the rpm and it works fine.
It’s the dependency hierarchy that’s doing my head in.
I don’t see any current requests for plplot in epel, but you can follow the guide here to request it in EPEL. Ultimately it depends on the maintainer and their time, but the best way to start is by opening a ticket as described there.
It’s also possible to build yourself using the fedora sources, which we can certainly help with, as well, though as you said, the dependencies might be a bit messy. This could be why it’s not (yet) in EPEL 9.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I have actually managed to persuade the desktop workstations powers that be to go with Ubuntu as they provide packages and follow the local university and colloquiums decision. This leaves me with servers and I can chose what I like there as I am the customer effectively provided the service layer runs so all good.
I always have this dilemma between a trusted source and a self-compile ‘static’ spin. It’s more of a philosophical dilemma than a technical one though and while I am fascinated, I also feel emotional about consistency and control.