Frequently Asked Questions

The Fedora distribution is, among other things, an upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). By adjusting buildroot and assorted configurations, ELN allows Fedora contributors who work on RHEL and other similarly targeted downstreams to judge the state of upstream from their perspective. The benefit for the Fedora distribution is that contributors who work on both upstream and downstream stay more continuously connected to the state of Fedora — especially, but not exclusively, Rawhide.

ELN is a continuous rebuild of Fedora Rawhide sources. Once in a while a certain snapshot of the ELN is used to bootstrap the new CentOS Stream for the new major RHEL release. There is no continuous synce between ELN and ant version of the CentOS Stream. Bootstrap activity happens only once for each CentOS Stream version. See the picture:

For the majority of packages, there is little or no difference between Rawhide and ELN packages. They are the same versions, usually built on the same libraries. But there are some buildroot differences in compiler flags and global macros that can result in build differences.

Note: Many packages have %if fedora / rhel conditionals in their specfiles that produce
differences between the built Rawhide and ELN packages.  Listing all of those differences
is beyond the scope of this document.

Never. In nearly all cases, you actually want to use the %{rhel} macro. If you think you need to use the %{eln} macro, file a ticket on the issue tracker with your justification.