Originally published at: EPEL Steering Committee Election: Interview with Neal Gompa (ngompa) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the EPEL Steering Committee Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, June 2 2025.
Interview with Neal Gompa
- Name: Neal Gompa
- FAS:
ngompa
Questions
What is your background in EPEL? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
I have been a packager for EPEL going back to EPEL for CentOS/RHEL 5. Most of my EPEL packages were for my own use for my machines running CentOS, particularly for my personal server infrastructure and now as part of enhancing the CentOS Hyperscale distribution that relies in large part on EPEL. Over the years, I worked on various initiatives for reconciling updates to the Fedora packaging guidelines with the older Enterprise Linux platforms. The most visible one I did was synchronizing the updated CMake macros in Fedora 33 to RHEL 8 and EPEL 7, which allowed packagers to maintain clean backports from Fedora to CentOS/RHEL in EPEL. A much less visible thing I do is work on CentOS Stream to update packages to support desktops like KDE Plasma and ensure that EPEL has what it needs to support the desktop on Enterprise Linux.
Why are you running for EPEL Steering Committee member?
As a long-time member of the Fedora community as a user and a contributor, I have benefited from the excellent work of many folks before me to ensure EPEL continues to evolve as an amazing representation of Fedora to the Enterprise Linux community. For the past few years, I have had the wonderful privilege of serving as a member of the EPEL Steering Committee, and I enjoyed my time serving to steer EPEL into the future, and I wish to continue to contribute my expertise to help analyze and make good decisions on evolving the Enterprise Linux platform.