On 9/18/19 9:03 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
You're making the right steps to start off, that's for sure.
Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to respond to me.
Is there a new user doc I can read or a place to start?
There are some pages in the wiki about building from source out of git, mainly https://wiki.centos.org/Sources but I'm not sure if you would consider them 'new user' docs or not; depends on what you mean by 'new user' I guess.
I should have said new contributor, not user. How do I contribute back to the CentOS project? It is pretty clear in this thread we have the developers saying "be patient we are a small team", but I don't see any clear path to offer my time to help like I do with the Fedora project. CentOS 8 is very much in my critical path for success within my organization. I want to use my personal and work time to contribute back. How do I do that?
It's giving you a 'forbidden' because it's not released. As a previous thread started out asking about 'what is Release Work' (which hasn't been answered), there is a lot of logistics involved in releasing something as large and as 'in-demand' as CentOS 8. Mirrors have to be populated, infrastructure has to be prepared, etc, for a release like this; mirrors have been syncing for a while, I would guess, as moving multiple gigabytes of data out to hundreds of servers is not an instantaneous thing. The last thing you want is a partial mirror being used before it's ready, thus the 'forbidden' results from the mirrors and from the main CentOS koji; bandwidth, even if you have 10gb/s worth, is scarce when you consider the thousands of people who are 'on pins and needles' to get their grubby little paws on fresh CentOS 8 ISOs and packages.......
So, the most important thing is to be patient; I'm probably going to wait until at least the 27th to even start downloading; I've waited this long, three more days isn't going to kill me.
Fedora builds off of Koji are not held captive, so why should they be for CentOS? We can download Fedora builds without issue off the composes or off of the Fedora Koji. I am pretty sure if the Fedora Project can pull this off, the CentOS project can get more resources from Red Hat to sustain the small subset of people that are technical enough to know about the CentOS Koji and the builds that are hosted there.
I highly doubt anyone that is going to use these builds for production and if they are able to figure how to get things going on their end, it is on them to support it. How can anyone help if the project keeps everything walled off?
Now, back to the idea of help. I have a bit of experience doing rebuilds, as I rebuilt CentOS 5.x for IA64 after CERN dropped SLC5 support on IA64, for our Altix 350 system (since retired). This was 2012 timeframes, by the way. Everyone here remembers the triple-threat release a few years back, when CentOS 6 was near release, CentOS 5.6 was near release, and CentOS 4.10 (I think it was 4.10, at least) was near release; that's the 'Old Days' of the OP on this thread, incidentally. I remember all those offers for help rebuilding packages, especially 5.6 packages. Well, as I was stepping up releases from the last SLC IA64 release (5.4), I found out the hard way what caused the 5.6 delay (if you want details, I can go back to my notes). See, to get a truly binary-compatible-to-RedHat distribution, packages sometimes have to be built in very specific orders, thus causing the actual package build process to be single-threaded, in a manner of speaking, at least back in 5.x days.
But there's a deeper thing here; there's a trust issue for all the people who use CentOS in a production setting; this is why packages are signed, and it's why there's a process for signing packages. CentOS is a trusted source, and getting the builds and signing too distributed can dilute the basis for that trust. It's kindof like before my middle daughter got engaged (and then married less than a month later); I told her that I had to know the boy before I could give the boy my blessing (so they forged ahead without my blessing.... one of those things). Not that I have reason to distrust you or anyone else; it's just that I don't have a proven reason to trust you, because I don't know you. I've run CentOS long enough to trust the current CentOS team, as well as some former members of that team (Hi, Russ!) rather deeply, because I've known them a long time (even though I've never met most of them in person).
Trust? Deeper things? I fully understand how CentOS is built and why there are things in place to ensure a high quality release. I'm not going to repackage the koji build as a CentOS prerelease and hoodwink anyone.
I think this kind of response nails my feelings on the problems we are seeing in this thread. I don't need to know you Lamar. You don't even have to know me either. I want to get access to the builds so I can start my own testing. I accept any issues that I find. I am capable enough to not only figure out how to fix my own problems, but I am also very willing submit them back to the project in any form that is useful. (or not if that is useful too)
I bet there are tons of people on this mailing list right now that are willing to beta test and provide meaningful help to the project to push the "Release CentOS cart" forward. This entire thread wouldn't be a thing if we had open access to the builds, a clear expectation that you are on your own if you use them, and a clear path to contribute back to the small team that is responsible for creating the next release of CentOS.
I know there are people willing to help with future releases. The CentOS project needs to enable us to do so. Fedora has a beta. RHEL has a beta. Why doesn't CentOS?
Joe