Is it ok to add the EPEL Repo to a ovirt node ng install?

Question

I am missing some tools on my ovirt nodes, which has been installed via the ovirt node ng installer.

My idea is to yum install epel-release. But I don't want to mix up versions of ovirt packages with the epel-release repo...

Is it safe to add ?

Answer 1

To answer my own question:

Don't enable all of the epel-release. The oVirt release notes of version 4.2.5 are very clear:

EPEL

TL;DR Don't enable all of EPEL on oVirt machines.

The ovirt-release package enables the EPEL repositories and includes several specific packages that are required from there. It also enables and uses the CentOS SIG repos, for other packages.

If you want to use other packages from EPEL, you should make sure to use includepkgs and add only those you need avoiding to override packages from other repos.

If you really need to enable the EPEL (or any other) repository then add an includepkgs to your repo config. This will filter out all other packages and thus not pollute your dependencies.

[epel]
...
includepkgs = desired_package

To actually install the EPEL release you have to download the repository rpm:

cd /tmp
curl -L https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm >epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
yum install epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm