Preface: My opinions here are my own, and may/may not reflect that of the distro blah blah.
On 5/18/07, Ray Van Dolson rvandolson@esri.com wrote:
I dunno that I'd feel too concerned about this. Anyone with the wherewithal to create and sustain development of a distro will be able to figure out all these steps on their own no doubt. After all, you guys got CentOS going didn't you? :)
Right, and those folks are just as welcome to rebuild from upstream as we do. I don't have any issue with folks doing that at all. My primary concern comes from the support/branding side of it. If I create some half-baked rebuild of centos and leave the centos naming and such in (because I followed a cookie cutter recipe and was lazy and/or didn't know how to) anyone who uses that distro will have a bad experience with 'centos', which will reflect poorly on us even though we have no control over that build.
In a similar vein, I'm quite happy with the Trixbox folks. They use centos as a base for their asterisk stuff and I'm very glad that they chose us; folks seem very happy with it. At the same time, when their users show up here on the list, or on irc saying they're using centos and having a problem with php 4.4.x or some other newer version that we don't ship, it can become difficult to clue them in on what's going on.
The average joe might be able to follow the instructions/tips and roll their own CentOS based distro, but I would be surprised to see it pick up steam unless they were truly motivated / competent in which case they probably wouldn't need the instructions in the first place...
And if they release something that fails, how do we migrate their users back in after their customizations, or reassure them that it wasn't really centos they're unhappy with....
I think it'd be interesting to have instructions available for at least replacing / upgrading the kernel on the installation CD's.
I do also, but I'd take a cautious approach and use the centosplus kernels or security updated kernels first, not a vanilla rebuild.