I downloaded chef for EL8 but says EL7 why?

Chef Infra (archive)
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Hi every one, I am new here and I am lerning how this works, mi question is:
I downloaded chef server and ws for RHEL8 but packege name says EL7 I was waiting to it will say EL8. Why is this like. Do I need to install EL7 in my EL8 box.

Thanks

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Hello!

Great question. I work on our Release Engineering team, so I have an answer for you. To minimize our build overhead we build all our packages on the oldest supported version for each OS and architecture (e.g., RHEL7) and then test those packages on all supported versions of that OS and architecture (e.g., RHEL8). The package you have downloaded, while it was built on RHEL7, has been tested and verified to work on RHEL8.

Hope this helps!

Tom Duffield
Chef Release Engineering

1 Like
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:slight_smile: Thanks for the answer

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May I encourage you to learn to use "mock" to build Red Hat compatible software for different Red Hat releases? I publish working examples for tools like Samba at GitHub - nkadel/samba4repo: Wrapper for SRPM building tools for Samba with domain controller on RHEL and Fedora, or for a lighter setup, GitHub - nkadel/nkadel-git229-srpm ? "mock" is what CentOS and fedora use to build their RPMs.

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The point is not mocking the platform, it's building once for multiple platforms. I.e: if rhel7 build work on rhel8, or if ubuntu 16 build works on ubuntu 18 and 20, then there's no reason to rebuild the whole package.

The way omnibus packaging create the rpm/deb/msi/dmg needs it to be on the target platform to compile the various parts in the client, the packaging is done to be statically linked to its own libraries to avoid impacts from slightly different libraries on various systems doesn't match the usual rpm build you could do when relying on the system libraries.