February 14th, 2011
by Fedora Team

The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is pleased to announce the release of EPEL 6. A community project, EPEL 6 is a collection of open source projects packaged specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which was released in November 2010, and other compatible systems. These supplementary applications, tools and libraries are maintained and supported by volunteers for the convenience and advancement of the community. Though EPEL is under the umbrella of the Fedora Project, it is not commercially supported by Red Hat.

This milestone marks the delivery of more than 2,500 source packages and 5,600 binary rpms in a single convenient repository. The EPEL maintainers began work on the EPEL 6 packages shortly after the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta was released in April 2010. The first EPEL 6 packages were built and pushed out to the EPEL community in early May.

Limited only by the number of volunteer maintainers, EPEL's packages span the many uses of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Some highlights include:

Project Management and Personal Productivity
rt3 – The Request Tracker Bug and Ticket tracking system
trac – Project management system
vym – graphical organization and thought mapping
System and Network Administration
BackupPC, rdiff-backup and other backup clients
collectd, munin, nagios and cacti monitoring solutions
rkhunter and chkrootkit security scanners
Datacenter Applications
haproxy, varnish and lighttpd proxies and web servers
Spamassassin plugins, clamav and other mail server and filtering solutions
Developer Support
Specialty compilers
Numerous Ruby, perl and python packages
Scientific Applications
Math libraries
life sciences
electronic systems design tools
The EPEL project was started back in 2007 when many in the community realized that the same infrastructure and packages used in Fedora could be built and maintained as add-on packages to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Much of the early driving force was Fedora infrastructure packages that were needed for Fedora, but it has grown from there to a large community of people who want to help maintain packages for the good of all. In total, there are currently more than 430 maintainers maintaining packages in EPEL. The output of the EPEL project is limited only by maintainers eager and willing to maintain packages.

The EPEL 6 project is looking for a few good maintainers! Interested in joining the effort or just learning more about the project? Please visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL for more information.

Information on using EPEL 6 is available from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL6-FAQ#How_do_I_use_it.3F.