Le jeudi 10 décembre 2020 à 12:39 +0000, Dan Seguin a écrit :
Who exactly do you expect will contribute to RHEL from the CENTOS community?
Why would *anybody* spend their own time, even their IT reputations rolling any of this mess?
I would, even if I wasn't paid by RH.
My job involve being a sysadmin, and so I run Centos servers in production, along some Fedora, some Debian and others, for myself and for work.
Each time I want to get a small new feature or fixes, not being able to easily contribute to RHEL (and so Centos) despites working at RH is a problem.
I have a few examples: a few years ago, I bought a Yubikey for myself. I want to use it on my RHEL 7 (my laptop) as a smartcard, but it was not supported.
I searched, found the fix is 2 lines in the usb-ids database. I opened a bug in may 2016, I provided the patch, went to complain on internal IRC to the right people, who escalated that in meeting, and it still took ~6 months: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157226
I knew what to do, because I had the same problem in 2014: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157226 where it took 1 year to get the fix in RHEL 7 (and so Centos 7).
On Fedora (or others faster distros) where there is a documented way to contribute, I would have waited a few weeks at best, maybe more in worst case (depending how persistant I am into getting a fix). With streams, I hope that at least, I wouldn't need to wait on "next minor release", given the delay it had.
And keep in mind that while I did that using my profesionnal relationship, I did it for myself, and others Centos users did benefit from it.
Another example, SELinux. When I see a unconfined service (last one, knot, for my personal DNS server, but also synapse or gitea, personal matrix and personal forge), I try to write a policy, and while on it, get it usable for others. Usually, I have not much trouble to get things in the Fedora package.
I have no hope to get it backported to RHEL (and so Centos), but at least, with Stream, I would have a path to try to get it done.
Again, I would write the policy for me anyway, so why shouldn't I try to share it with others ?
And I do not think I am the only one with a ethos of sharing bugfixes with the rest of the community. The whole free software movement is built on that.