Description of problem: Currently expat21-devel has a virtual provides for expat-devel. If you try to build an EL6 RPM on Fedora 27 via mock, mock shells out to yum-builddep to install the dependencies of the SRPM. yum-builddep is actually a symlink to dnf-utils on Fedora 27, which resolves the expat-devel requirement to expat21-devel due to the virtual provides. This causes problems for software that expects to find /usr/include/expat.h (expat21 moves it to /usr/include/expat21/expat.h). I believe this is a violation of EPEL policy. > EPEL packages should only enhance and never disturb the Enterprise Linux distributions they were built for. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): expat21-devel-2.1.0-1.el6
I ran into this today while running a scratch build of git for el6. Had this been blocked and returned? I haven't run into it before but it seems the virtual expat-devel provides have been in place since this package was added to epel. I agree that the virtual provides should be dropped. I almost filed that as a PR but it looks like there are also a number of security vulnerabilities in the package which should probably be addressed as well (or the package should be retired).
This package has changed maintainer in the Fedora. Reassigning to the new maintainer of this component.
This message is a reminder that EPEL 6 is nearing its end of life. Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for EPEL 6 on 2020-11-30. It is our policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a 'version' of 'el6'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later EPEL version. Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not able to fix it before EPEL 6 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.
EPEL el6 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2020-11-30. EPEL el6 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of EPEL please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.