I’ve seen a number of people ask things like: “Foo is in EPEL-6, why isn’t it in EPEL-7?” so I thought I would share a detailed answer:
In Fedora, all new releases are branched off rawhide, the ever moving forward release. This means every Fedora release starts out with a version of every package that was in rawhide at the time. This works great for Fedora, but EPEL is just a collection of add on packages, not a full distribution. New EPEL branches/releases appear only after the new RHEL version beta appears. Between RHEL6 and RHEL7 this was something like 3 years. A LOT can happen in 3 years in the open source world. Packages that were in EPEL-6, may make no sense in EPEL-7 (the base things they depend on may no longer exist in the base os, the maintainer may not want to commit to maintaining them there, they may have been renamed, etc). For these reasons, packages are added to EPEL-7 only on actual request of a maintainer. There was no mass branching of all packages in EPEL-6. They are different things and have different package needs.
Some examples: EPEL-6 has Xfce 4.8 in it. By the time EPEL-7 was created, Xfce 4.10 was out. Packages like ‘Terminal’ were re-named xfce4-terminal, new base library packages were added, etc. If we mass branched from EPEL-6 there would have been a bunch of packages we would immediately have to just remove because they could never build or exist.
If you want to get some package in EPEL-7 thats not currently there, file a bug on the package and ask that it be added to EPEL-7. If the maintainer doesn’t respond in a week and you are yourself a package maintainer, you can request the branch. If you aren’t you can ask on the epel-devel list for anyone interested in maintaining it for you.
Hope that clarifies things somewhat…