Ralph Angenendt wrote on 12/31/2010 08:44 AM:
Am 28.12.10 10:37, schrieb Filip Bartmann:
So why is CentOS development so closed? Why users can't have alphas, or betas of this distro and must use some other rebuild as Scientific Linux?
One of the reasons is the sheer volume.
The sheer volume would seem to be a good enabler and reason to have a more robust and open development process.
CentOS is in use (wild educated guess here) on a massively larger scale than SL is. Just getting out the isos for an alpha or beta or whatever will take at least a day to two for getting on all mirror servers. If you also want to have the packages, it even might take longer.
No reason I can see that alpha/beta releases should have to go to all the mirrors, nor even that it would be desirable. Torrents for the ISOs (as Timo Schoeler suggested) and perhaps a one or a few servers for direct ISO downloads (and possibly packages trees) would suffice.
Phil