[CentOS] EL 6 rollout strategies? (Scientific Linux)

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Thu May 19 13:13:19 UTC 2011


On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 13:54 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Mon, 16 May 2011, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> > It will be released when it is released, if you don't like it then leave.
> 
> Before I leave this list let me take you back about 7 years to the 
> Whitebox mailinglist. You may not remember that Whitebox had a list of 
> issues of its own, no timely updates, no community effort, lack of good
> communication. It was mostly a one-man-effort.
> 
> And the people on that list who were not pleased, included Johnny and 
> Karanbir. And it's striking (and ironic) how similar the discussions went 
> 7 years ago. Johnny said:
> 
>    [WBEL-users] WBEL Vs Centos ? :-S
>    http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004761.html
> 
>    "If timely updates are not a key factor for you, then WBEL is a great
>    distro.  If timely updates are the most important thing you consider
>    about the distro you want, then WBEL might not be a fit for you.  That
>    is all I have ever said ... and I have never said it meanly."
> 
> or:
> 
>    [WBEL-users] WBEL Vs Centos ? :-S
>    http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004740.html
> 
>    "I just think people should not have the expectation the WBEL is
>    community operated, it is not.  It's NOT like debian or gentoo where
>    others can get involved.  I know, I tried really hard to do so many
>    times.
> 
> Karanbir said:
> 
>    [WBEL-users] WBEL ...dead?
>    http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004684.html
> 
>    "Be a lil difficult to sell that to the IT Manager / CTO : Hang tight
>    dude, its comming. Anytime now."
> 
> or:
> 
>    [WBEL-users] WBEL ...dead?
>    http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004709.html
> 
>    "Why ? the other RHEL recompiles dont have this 'its coming, hang on'
>    attitude do they ?
> 
>    If there is a security issue out there, you can put in a fairly good
>    idea as to when its possible to deploy with them. Whats the scene with
>    WBEL ?"
> 
> The only difference I see is that back then Whitebox had only a fraction 
> of users, and even less using it for critical mission, while nowadays 
> people rely even more on timely security updates and releases coming from 
> CentOS. And people expect to help and contribute to the process to make 
> that happen.
----
The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Those of us who were
whitebox users surely remember how the updates came slower and slower
and our sense of frustration of never knowing how/if/when the updates
would come. Your reminder (because I had forgotten) that they used
timeliness as the main selling point for switching to CentOS well... if
that isn't a wake up call to Johnny & Karanbir, then nothing will do it.

At least John Morris never made any pretense of whitebox being a
community project nor did he promise updates to be anything except on
his own timetable. I remember how awkward I felt when Johnny would use
the WBEL mail list to suggest to people to switch to CentOS and laughed
the other day when he was rather perturbed because the CentOS list was
used to promote the idea of switching to SL. More irony.

I resolved to not install WBEL 4.0 on any system because I couldn't
trust it to be timely and now, here we are at 6.0 and I feel the same
way about CentOS. Full circle.

The sycophants on this list probably don't recognize just how valuable
the 'dag' repo (aka rpmforge) has been to the RHEL/CentOS/SL/etc.
ecosystem but my feeling is that if Dag can't hold the CentOS dev's feet
to the fire, then no one can. Evidently I am one of the "ungrateful
bastards"
<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-May/111670.html> but you
could never be considered to be one of them.

Craig


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