I am wondering about the guidelines for using the Rocky Devel repository.
Here’s my situation:
I need both the “avahi” and “avahi-tools” packages for x86_64 on Rocky 8.5. Package “avahi” is available from the BaseOS repo, but “avahi-tools” is only available from the Rocky Devel repo, which is defined on my system, but disabled by default. I am able to install “avahi-tools” by running “dnf install --enablerepo=devel avahi-tools”. When I do, however, I get a warning that says, “Rocky Linux 8.5 - Devel WARNING! FOR BUILDROOT AND KOJI USE”
Is it safe to use packages from Devel, especially on production systems? Any caveats?
What happened with “avahi-tools”, in particular? It used to be in the BaseOS repo on CentOS 7.
Red Hat changed everything. In RHEL7 it was in the optional-rpms repo. This is why it would have been in a CentOS base repo. In RHEL8 there is no longer extra-rpms or optional-rpms, so the changes have come because of Red Hat. RHEL has a dev repo called codebuilder repo, not tried it, so don’t know if that includes avahi-tools. But since Rocky has the devel repo, then chances are it could have.
Making decisions is one, but the lack of wordy rationale behind those decisions is what itches.
Or, does this conversation describe the situation better:
The Devel repo is basically for packages that are built by the build system (either because they’re required to build other packages, or they are built from the same sources as other packages) but Red Hat elected not to include in the final RHEL 8 release. It should be safe to enable this repo, but to be extra safe you can enable it and isolate those packages you need from the repo with an includepkgs directive.
The scary language is simply because these packages do not pass through the Red Hat QA process, also generally speaking you won’t need them unless you’re developing and building other packages (but there may be rare edge-case exceptions). If you need it go ahead and use it, but just beware of the above in doing so.
Keep in mind that if you do that then dnf will break as soon as there is an update available for avahi, because avahi-tools depends on the specific version of avahi that it was built against. If you enable the devel repo but add includepkgs=avahi-tools to /etc/yum.repos.d/Rocky-Devel.repo then dnf will only see the avahi-tools package from devel and won’t break when you try to update.