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

[Karanbir Singh]

On 01/05/2011 01:19 PM, Timo Schoeler wrote:
> Furthermore -- again, I don't want to cause any bad blood here -- I
> *heard* from people involved or at least informed in the building
> process that there *are* 'special scripts' (involved in the build
> process) that are kept secret.

erm, where did you hear about this ? Red Hat dont publish their build 
scripts for the distro - but we very much use the anaconda included 
scripts for the isos. Is there anything else that you are referring to ? 
for the buildsystem for rpms, c4/5 are built in a plague-server hosted 
setup, its patched up in quite a few places but there is nothing 
'special' about it. Most of the patching is to handle the odd build 
distribution process that we have to work with.

The keysign and move to release process is not public, it never will be. 
Buildsystem services are not public, they never will be. And just to be 
clear, the 'never will be' is subject to situations, resources and 
target goals. If you want to send over ~ 90k GBP to setup a homogeneous 
buildservice - and then offer to pay for a person's full time salary 
while they work with this system - let me know and we can work something 
out.

> "yes, we have things we don't want to share due to this or that reason
> but you are welcome to join us in IRC or somewhere else to see how we
> can get you involved helping CentOS" would be a signal. YMMV.

Can you point me at the place where you saw this ?

> Just have a look at other projects like FreeBSD, or even OpenBSD. Yes, I
> think one should use this as a reference. Not the bad or mediocre ones.

why ? neither of them do anything like centos ?

> The CentOS wiki is a good starting point. But at the moment it's not in
> the best state, AFAICS. Yes, I know everybody can help here -- but why
> not attracting people by creating more openness?

that's just very abstract and generic stuff. Can we please focus on 
specifics. eg. you dont want to spend anytime looking at the wiki 
because you cant see the script used to convert bash-foo.src.rpm into 
bash-foo.i386.rpm ??? I must be missing something here, otherwise that 
sounds quite mad. Specially when that script is hosted in a binary ( 
rpm-build ) included in the distro.

> What's the problem? Opening the code base (or build process, scripts,
> etc), so that anyone can 'try it at home' will not hurt the project. Not
> doing so, however, does hurt.

Timo, i suggest you look around a bit. The mock ver we use, the scripts 
everything are already included in the publicly available stuff. I can 
only guess here that you havent actually made any effort to either look 
or even understand what it is that CentOS does.

> Its simple maths: Open it, have 9,382 people try it, 43 fixing bugs, 23
> reporting back to you. (However, I doubt that in case 43 people applied
> working patches only 23 would report back -- that really would be a
> waste of time and energy.) You win 23 developers.

erm, I guess you need to go back and look at what CentOS is and what we 
do. Because that process you just outlined would be a massive waste of 
everyone's time.

> By not opening the process the count of those 'usual suspects' will at
> best remain at the current level.

I disagree. How do you think the usual suspects got to being the usual 
suspects ?

- KB