DevConf.US 2022

EPEL is a yum repository of community maintained packages for use on RHEL and related distributions. For most of its history, each version of EPEL was made available after the corresponding major version of RHEL. This slowed down package availability, which then slowed down adoption RHEL major versions. We recently flipped that model around, launching EPEL9 before RHEL9. For the first time ever, a new major version of RHEL has launched with a large set of EPEL packages already available. This talk will tell the story of our journey to EPEL9. We'll examine how EPEL Next and CentOS Stream enabled this outcome. You will leave this talk with a better understanding of how EPEL fits into the Red Hat ecosystem.