[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Digimer wrote:

> On 04/11/2011 03:10 PM, Dag Wieers wrote:
>> On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Tru Huynh wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 08:19:22PM +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
>>>
>>>> Considering you follow the "it's released when it's ready" mantra, what
>>> [ ... ]
>>>> I no longer expect any change.
>>>
>>> Then why are you always coming back here to voice your concerns
>>> if you don't expect any change?
>>
>> Convince me otherwise. These concerns are not just my concerns, I have had
>> companies calling me for more information or advice because these
>> questions go unanswered.
>>
>> But few people dare to raise their voice on this list.
>>
>> There have been interviews by CentOS developers on popular websites in the
>> past promising improvements to how the project is organized, but releases
>> take longer and development/QA stays closed. Why is that ?
>
> /putting on asbestos pants.
>
> each release is more complex than the last. The web of dependency grows,
> so the reverse-engineering takes longer and longer.

Not true for eg. CentOS 4.8 and CentOS 5.6, the complexity of those two or 
no more different than CentOS 4.7 or CentOS 5.5. Besides that, if you open 
up the QA and problems, there are more people that can jump in and help 
fix one issue.

I have compared it to the development of the Linux kernel, either you try 
to do everything by 3 people, or you open it up and let the community 
provide you with issues and provide pull requests. So that those 3 people 
simply have to merge those pull requests. It's a lot less work by the 
core, and it scales better because all those people waiting for the new 
release to be ready can actively participate and _make_ that release 
faster.

I would basicly make the whole discussion void, because anyone complaining 
could actively help the release go forward. Now we both know exactly what 
the issue was, we can guess or have to accept vague information.


> Perhaps the tact to take is to apply pressure to the upstream provider
> to release the build details? I am sure that many folks who start with
> CentOS, grow to be large and move to RH proper. So there is, I would
> venture, an argument to be made that RH providing this info to CentOS
> and helping CentOS thrive would be beneficial for their business.

Well, that could be useful too, but why sit and wait for something you 
cannot control to happen. Or take a decision that the project can 
implement today.

-- 
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, info at dagit.net, http://dagit.net/

[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]