On 05/06/2011 04:58 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 05/06/2011 03:43 PM, Charlie Brady wrote:
On Fri, 6 May 2011, Johnny Hughes wrote:
Millions of users have built scripts that depend on certain rules, like our use of dist tags, to remain constant.
Millions? Really? And you made promises that your use of dist tags would remain constant?
We explained how we do dist tags, yes. We said .el<X>.centos would be used for packages that are modified.
CentOS has millions of users, yes. The current estimate is somewhere around 4 million.
CentOS is installed on more Web servers that Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux combined:
Centos: 29.2% (Linux), 9.3% (Entire Web) RHEL: 14.5% (Linux), 4.6% (Entire Web) Fedora: 6.5% (Linux), 2.1% (Entire Web)
So yes, Charlie, there are millions of machines that use CentOS.
At least 8 of the top 500 super computers in world run CentOS.
Almost everyone one of them has some kind of script written for it. Do all of them care about dist tag. Of course not.
However, if we make a major change (like changing our dist tag), we have no idea how it will impact people. What kind of puppet deploy rules out there might have .el5.centos in their rules? How about cobbler? What about people's kickstarts? How about the guys that use spacewalk. What about the major corporation that pulls out all the .centos files and replaces those with their own, etc.
I know how it will impact me personally ... it will require several python, bash and perl scripts to be rewritten in the system that we use to build, mirror, and distribute CentOS. It will impact everything from the scripts that we use to pull down files from upstream and where they get put to how we check files against each other, to how we send e-mails to the announce list, etc., etc.
Who knows the impact on the Example ISP who is host 50,000 CentOS servers using CPanel or the Example2 ISP that does all their machines on xen VMs ahd deploys with cobbler. What about the OSes that use CentOS as a basis for them (ClearOS, Rocks Clusters, etc.).
The point is, we can't just change things mid stream because we have no idea what scripts and software from which users might do something with dist tag.
I can tell you that when Red Hat changed the way they did dist tag, it had a major impact on the CentOS Project. We changing our dist tag could have the same kind of impact on others. 9.3% of the world's Internet runs on CentOS. 9.3% ... quite a lot.
Here are a couple other references:
Amazon EC2: http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/04/25/2011/Meet-Tanuki-ten-thousand-core-sup...