@feld @anemone @sun Yes, RHEL has very small repos even compared to the small repos of Arch for example. It's because Red Hat is contractually liable for security guaranties and timely security updates and when damages to the company occur thanks to RHEL and the system ran up-to-date version of the problematic package and few other things are right, the company can sue RH for those damages.

Debian doesn't have that. What it has is a large repo of software with a surprising number of orphaned and unmaintained packages.

Also EL has EPEL and ELRepo that have almost everything you would want (not counting PHP; that's Remi.) and aren't supported under RH support contracts.