New extras repository for Red Hat Enteprise Linux

If you need a software app that is not included or supported in the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS distribution, Red Hat’s new Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository might be an excellent place to go fishing.

“EPEL is a community of package maintainers working from inside of Fedora,” explained Karsten Wade, Fedora Docs Project go-to guy, on the fedora-announce-list last Friday. “Many are the same people who maintain the Fedora version.” Wade says the repository contains about 1,000 packages and currently is adding “several dozen packages every week.”

Though Red Hat provides the infrastructure, the company does not commercially support the repository. Like Fedora, it is a “volunteer-based community effort,” according to the EPEL/FAQ. Red Hat engineers are involved as maintainers and project leaders. The FAQ explains that EPEL differs from other third-party repositories in several significant ways:

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