[CentOS-devel] are there any chances to see finished CentOS6 in 2011?

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> Can you quantify what you mean by 'open approach' ( basically, what
> steps and what gains those steps would bring about )
>
>>     The aim was to focus people's attention to the upstream beta, better
>>     product and that loop etc. We could have started earlier, sure. But now
>>     that we have started 2 months back and your own contribution status
>>     stays at nil, why are you interested ?
>> How and what should be contributed if the normal user didn't even know
>> what problems remains?
>
> Problems remain where ? in CentOS or RHEL ? It was RHEL6 that had a
> public beta, for issues that should have been reported against
> bugzilla.r.c; or am I misunderstanding what you said ?
>
> Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of the fact that there are issues
> and situations that need looking at and changing. But lets do the right
> thing rather than just doing something. Going by the popularist current
> mood of people on this list, I think people just want early access to a
> codebase they can start using for their own use rather than actually
> working towards building CentOS-6. Which makes me fear that the only way
> we are going to get C6 out of the door in the next few weeks is by
> clamping up,  talking to the usual-suspects and just going back to the
> CentOS-5 process. And to be honest, I don't really think these
> conversations over the past two months have been wasted; but in the
> grant scheme of things - getting 6.0 out of the door might be a better
> target for now - as long as we can somehow agree that we get back to
> this process engineering immediately after so as to not be in the same
> situation, come 6.1.
>
> Also, failback to the CentOS-5 process isn't necessarily a bad thing -
> we know it works :)

As a fairly new subscriber, I've not really found anything technically
wrong with the process.  Mostly because I have no idea what the
process is.  From what I can tell, the CentOS developers pick up
SRPMS, debrand, "magically" build them somehow, and then publish them
when done.

There probably isn't anything wrong at all with that, but since it's
not documented anywhere and the buildsystem being used isn't
documented either, it's sort of a big black box.  So to me, a more
"open" process could start with simply documenting the actual process,
including the buildsystem and/or build order of the packages.  Maybe
I've missed this somewhere in the wiki already, but if I have it's
because it's hard to find (at least in my looking).

FWIW, I rather liked the call-for-help on debranding, even if it had
limited participation.  I think it's exactly the kind of task that can
be distributed to relative new-comers and might lead to further
participation.

josh