A discussion at [[ https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/whither_epel/ | Wither EPEL? ]] at FOSDEM 2016 centred on the the problem of a newer version of a package being pushed to EPEL (say version 6) when the same package is in the following EL release (i.e. 7). This causes a problem for EPEL users who then change between EL releases.

It seems to me that this is very similar to what the upgradepath task does between Fedora releases, and it could perhaps also detect this problem.

To give a specific example that I've contributed to:

1. 'augeas' is in EPEL5 and has had builds starting from 0.5.0
2. augeas was added to EL6 base on release at version 0.7.2, updated to 0.9.0 later and finally to 1.0.0 (IIRC)
3. EPEL5's augeas has been continually updated, with the latest update being 1.2.0 (FEDORA-EPEL-2014-0581), two minor versions newer than EL6

Ideally, a QA task should have detected the EPEL5 updates that were newer than EL6 and EL7 (1.1.0), and warned the maintainers and/or blocked them from proceeding.

It was mentioned that the git package also differs between EPEL5 and EL6 too, but in that case the fault was RH's for taking an older version than was already in EPEL5.