Newer version of cmake available in CentOS 7 than in CentOS 8? - cmake

Question

I have CentOS 7 and CentOS 8 installed on 2 VMs. Both have epel enabled.
CentOS 7:
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.8.2003 (Core)
$ yum repolist
...
repo id repo name status
base/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Base 10070
epel/x86_64 Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64 13445
extras/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Extras 413
updates/7/x86_64 CentOS-7 - Updates 1127
repolist: 25055
CentOS 8:
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 8.2.2004 (Core)
$ yum repolist
repo id repo name
AppStream CentOS-8 - AppStream
BaseOS CentOS-8 - Base
PowerTools CentOS-8 - PowerTools
epel Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64
epel-modular Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64
extras CentOS-8 - Extras
On CentOS 7, cmake3 is available from the epel repo, and provides cmake version 3.17.
$ yum provides cmake3
...
cmake3-3.17.3-3.el7.x86_64 : Cross-platform make system
Repo : epel
On CentOS 8, cmake3 is available from the AppStream repo, and provides cmake version 3.11.
$ yum provides cmake3
...
cmake-3.11.4-7.el8.x86_64 : Cross-platform make system
Repo : #System
Matched from:
Provide : cmake3 = 3.11.4-7.el8
I tried to disable all repos except for epel, but it's still coming back with the one from AppStream (which seems counter intuitive to me - surely it should come back with nothing if I've disabled all the other repos?)
$ yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=epel info cmake
Last metadata expiration check: 0:21:06 ago on Fri 11 Sep 2020 09:44:08 AM UTC.
Installed Packages
Name : cmake
Version : 3.11.4
Release : 7.el8
Architecture : x86_64
Size : 24 M
Source : cmake-3.11.4-7.el8.src.rpm
Repository : #System
From repo : AppStream
Summary : Cross-platform make system
URL : http://www.cmake.org
License : BSD and MIT and zlib
Description : CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple
: platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates
: native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler
: environment of your choice. CMake is quite sophisticated: it is possible
: to support complex environments requiring system configuration, preprocessor
: generation, code generation, and template instantiation.
I searched on pkgs.org, and it certainly does seem that cmake-3.11 is the latest version available to CentOS 8.
Apart from building from source, is there any other way to obtain a newer version of cmake on CentOD 8?

Answer 1

The cmake: 3.11.4 version will still be listed when you run yum info because it is already installed, so disabling the AppStream repo won't affect what is shown. If you only want to show available packages (based on your enabled yum repos), you can run this instead:
yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=epel info cmake --available
If you want to install the latest version of CMake (or some other version), you can always download the binary distribution from the CMake download page.
Once downloaded, you can extract the package to somewhere you have access to on your machine, e.g.:
mkdir ~/cmake
tar xvzf ~/Downloads/cmake-3.18.2-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C ~/cmake
Finally, make sure you add the extracted bin directory to your PATH environment variable so you can run the cmake executable from the command line.