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On 01/29/2014 07:39 AM, Clint Savage wrote:
The value of a separate rebuild is not about duplicating effort. It's more about using and improving the tools in a separate environment. I have found that as a tool grows, it needs multiple contributors from different environments to become full featured, more secure, etc. Having separate communities contributing to CentOS in the form of a SIG seems like one way to homogenize the effort, removing some of these opportunities for improving tooling and the distribution itself.
While I definitely see the value of doing all the things in one place within CentOS -- or I wouldn't have worked on the project to get us here -- I'm also realistic that not everyone will want or be able to come to the one place to do all the things. At the minimum, it's a good thing to have an open communication channel with rebuilders who want to do their work outside of the CentOS environment; it might make sense to have that channel more formalized as a group.
There is another lesson I'm trying to learn from, an example of which is the Fedora build toolchain (Koji, Bodhi, etc.) I've talked with people who share a concern that the build tools are missing the chance to be better because they are not massively adopted. There are people using Koji, for example, but AIUI it's not a huge contributor base. Simply having more people using Koji is good for all the users of Koji - - it will help it be more robust and useful through the usual process of open source development benefiting from a sizeable userbase.
Thus my thinking that an interoperability SIG would fulfill the communication channel to the inevitably going-their-own-way rebuilders, would provide a way for groups to choose in the future to join the overall CentOS effort in some way, and be a group within CentOS that cares about the tools being useful and used somewhere they weren't invented.
- - Karsten - -- Karsten 'quaid' Wade .^\ CentOS Engineering Manager http://TheOpenSourceWay.org \ http://community.redhat.com @quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC) \v' gpg: AD0E0C41