Red Hat Looking To Bolster EPEL

Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper.

The Fedora-hosted Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) has been a great success for complementing the package selection available on RHEL, CentOS, and friends. This Fedora special interest group has done a great job providing and maintaining this wide assortment of additional packages for easy deployment on RHEL-based distributions.

The news now is that Red Hat is going to be employing some folks to work on EPEL as well. The CentOS blog posted a notice about the forthcoming change:

We are pleased to announce that Red Hat is establishing a small team directly responsible for participating in EPEL activities. Their job isn't to displace the EPEL community, but rather to support it full-time. We expect many beneficial effects, among those better EPEL readiness for a RHEL major release. The EPEL team will be part of the wider Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short.