Rocky Devel repository

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.

Thanks.

-jm

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.

Which CentOS (and hence Rocky and Alma) did rename ‘powertools’ (in fear of trademark issue).
In CentOS Stream 9 that repoid seems to be ‘crb’.

In CentOS Stream 8 the ‘devel’ repo is completely empty.

Considerations in adopting RHEL 8 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | Red Hat Customer Portal lists ‘avahi-tools’ in section:

A.4. Removed packages
Packages that are part of RHEL 7 but are not distributed with RHEL 8

Clearly needed for building EL8 distro, but not distributed with EL8 … :thinking:

Yup, don’t you just love Red Hat deciding for you what packages you need and don’t need.

Making decisions is one, but the lack of wordy rationale behind those decisions is what itches.
Or, does this conversation describe the situation better:

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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.

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Thanks for the detailed response. I will play it safe by leaving this repo disabled, and enabling as needed with the “–enablerepo” option.

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.

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Ah, that makes more sense. Not a big deal to update the .repo file, as the two packages are only deployed on a small number of our production systems.

Thanks again.