Notice to sites about gfal2 packaging issue

GFAL (Grid File Access Library) is a library and command-line tool for uniformly accessing files using a wide variety of protocols, including SRM, XRootD, and GridFTP. Some OSG meta-packages recently switched from requiring lcg-util to gfal2-util (which comes from EPEL), but most sites have not switched to GFAL 2 yet. If you do not use GFAL 2 from EPEL, you may skip the rest of this message.

EPEL recently released gfal2-2.8.1-1, an update to the core GFAL code. This update splits one binary package into several, resulting in new failures for at least one common use case that the OSG Software team tests (using gfal-copy to/from a file:// URI). There is a simple workaround for now. If you install and use gfal2-util, especially with local filesystem endpoints, please install an extra GFAL package as follows:

yum install gfal2-plugin-file

OSG hopes to have a fully automated solution to this issue in time for the March release. If you have any questions or comments about GFAL, please contact .