On Friday, June 13, 2014 12:42 PM, Christoph Galuschka wrote:
Am 13.06.2014 21:39, schrieb Kay Williams:
Fyi - I have entered an upstream bug requesting that srpms continue
to
be posted at ftp.redhat.com. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1109401
That bug is allready private :)
Here is the text. Perhaps others can submit separate bugs. Or perhaps others will know of a better channel to submit feedback to upstream, not sure. Maybe twitter? :-)
============================================================================ ===
Description of problem:
For previous versions of RHEL, SRPMS were available for download from http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/...
For RHEL 7, a README.TXT file in these locations states:
----------
Current sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 have been moved to the following location:
https://git.centos.org/project/rpms
-----------
This change is problematic for a number of reasons:
1. The new location does not provide sources in SRPM format. Instead, source code is available from git repositories.
2. Obtaining sources from git repositories is more cumbersome than working with srpms. First git must be installed. Then the repository cloned. At this point a small subset of the sources is downloaded (typically the spec files and patches). An additional utility (get_sources.sh) must be downloaded and used to obtain the remaining sources.
Compare this to downloading an srpm and running 'rpm -i .." to obtain the sources.
3. Sources from the centos git repositories are not guaranteed to be 'pristine'. CentOS changes source code for a number of packages. While it is possible to filter out the CentOS changes, this is an extra step. It seems appropriate for Red Hat (in the spirit of open source) to provide pristine sources.
4. Many tools exist today for working with srpms. For example, srpms can be easily queried and downloaded using yum in a manner very similar to rpms. These tools allow organizations to download, patch and rebuild software, e.g. to fix bugs or add features. On a broader scale, such tools allow third parties to create custom Linux distribution based on Red Hat sources.
Because of the substantial differences between SRPMs and git repositories, new tools will need to be written, and existing tools will need to be significantly rewritten.
Git repositories do have some advantages, and, over the long run, the git model may well be preferable to the SRPM model. Certainly, git repos make sense as a companion to srpms.
In the short run, however, the abrupt removal of srpms creates a great deal of (seemingly unnecessary) pain and confusion for the community.
Please consider making srpms available again, at least for some period of time. This allows tools to be updated and an orderly transition to occur.
In addition, it would be useful to see a statement from Red Hat on the reasoning behind the change. This would reduce confusion, as well as suspicion that Red Hat desires to make it harder to access source code.