On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
I thought _THE_ selling point of open source has always been that in case of problems the vendor can't/won't fix, you have the option to make the change yourself. But if you can't rebuild their packages or even tell how the source relates to the shipped binary, that isn't true and shouldn't be represented as such.
You are working on the assumption that you cant build the packages.... which I can assure you is not try. Look, there is this thing called CentOS which should prove that its possible to rebuild and build exactly whats happening upstream too :)
What is even more, I would like to welcome any Open Source project rebuilding RHEL. Not only do I think this would provide healthy competition/collaboration between projects (again), different projects may tackle problems differently, adding to the ecosystem. Questions about the process would bring clarity and may help with better documentation of the RHEL build process, validation and QA.
A new rebuild project also does not impose any limits that new users experience when contributing to the core of the CentOS project. (limitations related to trust, signing, empowerment, mindset, ...)
And I hope a project rethinking the rebuild process without the baggage and continuous effort/strain to produce update release may be more practical too.
The success of CentOS caused some other projects to fade away, which I think is unfortunate but understandable.