On 03/21/2011 08:07 AM, Jason Pyeron wrote:
I think I was misunderstood. Our concern is to have the latest from the upstream vendor available as soon as possible. We run about 30-40 centos systems and about the same in RHEL, it is difficult when there are differences. Since we are not distributing, we often recompile (without modification) SRPMs and add them to our local yum repo as a stop gap.
Other times were are implementing a bugfix, or feature for a given customer, we know are way around the few packages we deal with every day.
I think it would be nice, if our efforts were in sync with this group and benefited everyone.
I'm completely unaffiliated w/ CentOS development but I think that while your offer of assistance is greatly appreciated, it's likely somewhat outside of what the issues that the CentOS team actually faces. Rebuilding an SRPM is really a non-issue, and I doubt that it's even CPU cycles that is a major factor with getting out an update - especially when it's just updates vs. a entirely new version of the OS.
The issue/challenge/difficulty is with rebuilding the SRPM, ensuring the binary compatibility w/ upstream (were there missing build-reqs that now made the CentOS version not include some files or have library/binary differences), trademark issues, other quirks such as abrt wanting to send traces to RH's bugzilla).
For a simple package where rpmbuild --rebuild pkg.src.rpm is sufficient, there's really nothing to the process.
I suspect that while the CentOS team could release some of the updates to 5.5 and/or 5.6 even though the full 5.6 release hasn't occurred yet, these updates are held back in the event that an issue is discovered that requires a rebuild of a package that was thought to be correct and already released. There really is no provision for 'errata' to packages since if upstream releases pkg-1.0-2, CentOS can't push out pkg-1.0-3 since that now creates differences between upstream.
That being said, they have put out the bind97 and php53 packages, but only in the c5-testing repo allowing for users that should understand what they are undertaking to test/utilize them without affecting the general userbase.