Hi All,
I wanted to take a moment to thank the CentOS Stream contributor community and give an update on where we're at from the Red Hat Linux Engineering side.
The contributions coming in for CentOS Stream, particularly Stream 9, have been fantastic. This is the kind of feedback loop we are trying to build, and the willingness to jump in headfirst from the community even though we still have some bumpy spots in workflow and guidance is much appreciated. We've seen:
- package rebases - compose adjustments - bug fixes - subpackage additions
and more from the community. While not all of them were accepted into CentOS Stream, overall it's been great.
As we march towards spring, the Linux Engineering team is going to be focusing on finishing up the releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 and 9.0. Thankfully, the continuous development model of CentOS Stream means that it won't stop and community contributions should keep on going. With that being said, what each Linux Eng team needs to do varies widely and it may result in some slower or intermittent responses to contributions for the next few months. If someone doesn't respond quickly or asks to defer a contribution, please have a little patience. We'll get to it eventually.
Lastly, I wanted to give some forward-looking contribution advice. CentOS Stream 9 has seen quite a bit of flux since we made it available. This has been quite helpful to shape the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta, and what will be the RHEL 9 GA. After RHEL 9 GA, things will solidify more into what one would normally expect from an Enterprise Linux operating system. Package versions will settle, rebases will be less common, and our Linux Eng maintainers will need to evaluate CentOS Stream 9 contributions fully against the standards we have for RHEL.
For contributions that are just outside of those standards in some way, we have a variety of other avenues within the CentOS project. Several CentOS SIGs are active today, building additional content on top of CentOS Stream. We also have associated projects like EPEL. If you have a contribution and you're not quite sure if it's something CentOS Stream can accommodate, please reach out to the Feature Request SIG [1]. They're there to help you navigate the best place for a contribution, and to help shephard along where they can.
Thank you so much for the success we've had to date. It's far from perfect, but building out a new project is fun in and of itself.
josh
[1] https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/StreamFeatureRequest