One of the major values of the EL rebuild ecosystem is the ability to interoperate, or the ability to fork from the upstream. This provides purpose in many ways, choice being the most heralded. Since the CentOS community has teamed up with Red Hat to allow for Special Interest Groups to join them, it seems that there might be a bit less of an ecosystem available. The goal of the Interoperability SIG is to ensure that the ability to fork and rebuild still exist.
Our communities already exist outside of the CentOS community purview. They are currently the GoOSe Project[1] and the Ascendos Project[2]. This shared community will serve as a "reference implementation", yet will still be operated and marketed as a product and community separate from CentOS. Consider it something of CentOS "embassy" of sorts.
It would seem that this SIG could be construed as contrary to the goals of the CentOS project. However, we believe there is value added to the CentOS project. We are interested in improving the CentOS community in at least a few ways.
* Providing feedback and collaboration on common issues. Including, but not limited to, reporting bugs, providing patches, discussing packaging techniques, rebuilding variants, QA, ISO building, etc.
* Collaboration on documentation of the rebuild process, rebranding of documentation, providing new documentation, etc.
* Build or maintain tools to ease rebranding of upstream packages as to ease adoption by companies who build upon and release software based on CentOS.
* Providing tools to help monitor statuses of builds, repositories, releases, etc. Whether they be part of the CentOS community or otherwise.
With these goals in mind, we'd like to formally request an Interoperability Special Interest Group within the CentOS community. Please let us know how to further proceed.
Cheers,
Clint Savage
Lead Developer, GoOSe project
1 - http://gooseproject.org (#gooseproject on irc.freenode.net)
2 - http://ascendos.org (#ascendos on irc.freenode.net)