Where has puppet gone in EPEL-6

This week various people using EPEL on RHEL and CentOS 6 have found that the puppet package is no longer provided by EPEL. The reason for this is due to the way EPEL packages are built and kept inside the repository. A package needs a sponsor so that we can hopefully get bug fixes and security updates to it. In the case of puppet this package is sponsored by the user kanarip. However, most packages aren't whole pieces, they rely on other software.. in this case the package puppet relies on a lot of different ruby gems of which one of them was called ruby-shadow. This package was orphaned 30 weeks ago and while it did have other people watching it, none of them took over the package.

Depending on: ruby-shadow (3), status change: 2016-04-13 (30 weeks ago)
        puppet (maintained by: kanarip, domcleal, gchamoul, georgiou, jehane, jpo, lzap, mmagr, moses, rharrison, skottler, stahnma)
                puppet-2.7.26-2.el6.noarch requires ruby-shadow = 1.4.1-13.el6

        puppet-gluster (maintained by: averi, purpleidea)
                puppet-gluster-0.0.3-1.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

        puppetlabs-stdlib (maintained by: averi, gchamoul, purpleidea, shlomizadok)
                puppetlabs-stdlib-4.5.1-2.20150121git7a91f20.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

Last week a large cleanup was done to clean out orphaned packages from EPEL which removed ruby-shadow. Once that was removed, then all of the other packages depending on ruby-shadow were also removed. Today various people reinstalling systems found puppet wasn't around and came onto #epel to ask.. which seems to have gotten the packages responsored and hopefully they will be back in the EPEL release in a day or so.

This problem has been happening a lot lately. I think it shows quite a few problems with how EPEL is set up and managed. For this, I take responsibility as I said I would try to clean it up after FOSDEM 2016 and it is still happening.

[Correction 2016-12-01 added. Please see my updated post.]