EPEL Proposal #4: Build it all in CentOS promote to RHEL

So this one came up when we were going over problems with building alternative architectures in EPEL. One of the big problems is that currently everything is built against Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This has some bonuses for some people but it causes a problem when architectures are built against by CentOS but not Red Hat. [E.G. EL-7 for i386 and arm32] When a Red Hat release is done, the builders usually get updated as part of our repopull from the RHN servers. Usually there are some changes in added and subtracted packages which can cause packages to get new dependencies. While this is an inconvenience to customers.. it isn't a problem for the builders. When we start mixing distributions, it does cause a problem with the builders because a package may get compiled for EL-7 x86_64 and not be the same as arm32 or i386 due to the fact that buildroots for i386 are not as up2date as the RHEL ones. This can cause builds all across the system to break so it is frowned on.

A couple of proposed fixes were:

1.  Compile everything against CentOS. This has the bonus that they all kind of get updated at the same time so breakages from going from 7.3 to 7.4 is smaller. However, a lot of business users have either ITIL or security plans which allow for EPEL packages to be used on their systems because they were built against RHEL versus a rebuild. Remove that and it causes various problems for users.
2. Split off the builds for alternative architectures in a shadow koji which is turned off when these splits occur. This makes it partially easier to manage but brings in other problems.
3. ... some other ways to fix this that I don't know how to describe correctly...

However while we were hashing on 1, someone else who had been asking about why don't we build everything came up with a different mix. Build everything against CentOS for various architectures and put it in some other repository (Extra Packages in CentOS came to mind). Packages which people really want and are willing to care for are branched off into EPEL packages which are built against RHEL. [Or if they really want it they get a business case to Red Hat to make it a product they will pay for it.]

There is a lot of problems with the above.. it requires a lot of work in many different moving parts to get done. It also could be even more confusing than what we have already. However, I did say I was going to write up all the proposals for people to look at.