My team and I manage some CentOS 7 servers with Tomcat on them. Now Red Hat have removed Tomcat from RHEL seemingly in the hope it’ll make people to buy JBoss subscriptions, we need to work out how to manage Tomcat on AlmaLinux 9. Index of /development/almalinux/9/devel/ shows up in a Google search for “almalinux tomcat” and there’s Tomcat rpms in there. So perhaps we can use of that repo and that’s our Tomcat problem solved. But, what is that repo? It’s not listed at AlmaLinux Repositories | AlmaLinux Wiki It doesn’t appear in any of the files provided by the almalinux-repos package.
Does anyone know what the purpose of this repo is?
I’ve had a quick look, and I think the key phrase is “Information about the main AlmaLinux repositories and how to install them can be found on this page”. main, not “every”. It might be a good idea to ping @jlehtone before using it, “devel” to me sounds a loud warning bell for a production system. You’ll have to configure the .repo file yourself though, I can’t find a devel-release package.
Alas, I don’t know for a fact what the “devel” is but I have seen it mentioned multiple times.
Regulars at the chat probably do know. https://chat.almalinux.org/
I’d guess that it is similar to the ‘devel’ that CentOS had: https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/develrepo
That is, in order to build all the packages of the distro one actually needs tools that are not in the distro.
Does one need something from Tomcat in order to build Alma 9 packages? I doubt that. Perhaps the devel has “extra” packages for various reasons.
1 Like
I’ve been told on the chat that Index of /development/almalinux/9/devel/ contains packages used to bootstrap AlmaLinux 9, it might be removed at any time, it should not be relied upon.
From file modification dates I guess these were initial packages after modifying and building SPECS from CentOS Stream 9. Most of these are BaseOS packages. I am not sure if there are any other packages except BaseOS.
And for Tomcat, if you can build from source that will also be viable. Writing spec file is not that hard if you have a good development team. Also there is a community version of JBoss named WildFly. You most probably can use that too.