RPM Fusion for EL in the early testing stage

A lot of people in the past asked for a „Livna for RHEL/CentOS“. There were rough plans to create one, but they got dropped immediately when the idea to merge Livna with other 3rd party repositories for Fedora came up. That lead to RPM Fusion being formed,which was announced one week ago.

Sharp eyes will have noticed that the announcement did not contain any information's regarding support for EL. That was on purpose – we focused on getting RPM Fusion running, hence the EL branch (which was planed right from the start) did not get as much love as the Fedora branch. But the EL branch is in the works and some of the most important RPM Fusion packages have been built for EL already. Xine and xine-lib-extras-freeworld for example are available in the testing repository already; the AMD and Nvidia drivers are still missing, just like mplayer and vlc. But all of them should hopefully get into the repositories over the next few weeks.

You can already help testing the RPM Fusion packages for EL repositories by enabling it with this command:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/updates/testing/5/x86_64/rpmfusion-free-release-5-0.1.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/updates/testing/5/x86_64/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-5-0.1.noarch.rpm

Some of the RPM Fusion packages for EL require bits from EPEL, hence it's necessary that you have EPEL configured and enabled as well – just like you had to enable Fedora Extras to use Livna in the Fedora Core days. Just remember that the RPM Fusion for EL repositories are still in the early stages. Also not that you for now need to enable epel-testing, as some of the RPM Fusion packages depend on packages that are currently in epel-testing. That requirement should hopefully vanish with the next testing -> stable move in EPEL. The RPM Fusion for EL repositories of course don't replace and packages from EL or EPEL.

Note that not all RPM Fusion contributors have interest in building their packages for EL (just like not all Fedora contributors participate in EPEL). Hence we could need some help and people with rpm packaging skills that help getting the RPM Fusion repositories for EL filled and maintained. If you are interested contact me in private or (preferred) join the mailing list and just start to help.

Smooge new EPEL Steering Committee chairmen

It was mentioned in the EPEL reports and on the epel-devel-list already, but it might be good to announce it here as well: after leading the EPEL effort/the EPEL Steering Committee for about one year I'm stepping down as chairmen and leave the EPEL Steering Committee to make room for new members and fresh ideas.

Some minutes ago Stephen J Smoogen (smooge) was elected as new chairmen for the EPEL Steering Committee. Congrats smmoge! I'm sure you'll do a good job and get some new ideas realized in EPEL.

I'll stay involved in EPEL, but I'd like to focus a bit on RPM Fusion over the next few months. In the past weeks keeping EPEL and Livna running consumed most of my free time which kind of sucked as RPM Fusion really needs more attention; hopefully we can make it lift of soon (the current situations kind of reminds me of the FC2/FC3 days when the real Fedora Extras also started quite slowly...).

P.S.: Since a few days EPEL5 & EPEL5 testing include about 2000 packages (counting RPMS here, not SRPMS). I'd say that quite a lot what we got into EPEL in the past months since EPEL started. Another reason to make room for some fresh ideas in the EPEL Steering Committee.

A milestone: More than 1000 packages in EPEL5!

I'm proud to present some statistics from the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)" SIG:

$ repoquery -qa --archlist="src" --repoid=epel5-source --repoid=epel5-testing-source | wc -l
1006

In other words: we have now more then 1000 different software packages (counting SRPMs) in the EPEL5 repositories for RHEL5/CentOS5.

Thanks to all Fedora contributers that also participate in EPEL! You made this happen!

Next goal are 2000 Binary RPMs in EPEL5. Shouldn't take that long:

$ repoquery -qa  --repoid=epel5 --repoid=epel5-testing | wc -l
1861