Installing dependencies on CentOS 8 fails due to libyaml-devel

[strzibny]

libyaml-devel is no longer in the enabled repositories.

We need to run dnf with --enablerepo=PowerTools.

[postmodern]

I'm curious how RedHat's shift to CentOS Stream might change this?

[ilikepi]

Yeah, unfortunately this is the result of RedHat setting fire to everything with RHEL and CentOS. They pushed a bunch of packages that are primarily for developers (e.g. lots of -devel packages) into a separate repo so they could call the whole set of them "unsupported". In distros derived from RHEL 8 this repo is called "powertools", and in RHEL 9 it's "crb" (short for "CodeReady Builder" apparently 🤷‍♂️). In both cases these repos are disabled by default. I ran into this tonight as well, on AlmaLinux 9...I had to enable the "crb" repo before I could installlibyaml-devel and gdbm-devel.

I tried to find related documentation specific to CentOS Stream, but lots of what's on centos.org is broken or outdated 🙄 ...they helpfully point out that CentOS 8 Stream is EOL in about 6 weeks, even though RHEL 8 will get maintenance for another 5 years.

[postmodern]

Grumble. *shakes fist at RedHat*. I guess we need to add some logic to install_packages to check if we're running on an RHEL derived distro (how many are there besides Alma Linux?) and add --enablerepo=PowerTools to the dnf install command.

[ilikepi]

(how many are there besides Alma Linux?)

At the very least, I think this issue would apply to:

• RHEL 8/9
• CentOS 8/9 Stream
• AlmaLinux 8/9
• Oracle Linux 8/9
• Rocky Linux 8/9

I think Amazon Linux or whatever it's called is derived from RHEL as well, but I'm not sure what version it's based on or to what degree they've modified the organization of their package repositories...

EDIT: one way to detect this might be to look for /etc/redhat-release, since derivative distros looking to maintain some level of compatibility with RHEL will likely have this file. AlmaLinux creates it as a symlink to /etc/almalinux-release for example.