"CMC" == C.M. Connelly cmc@math.hmc.edu "JH" == Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com

I'm sorry if my comment was misconstrued -- I do appreciate the (unpaid) time and energy you and others devote to CentOS, but as an end user, while I can and do try to contribute in some ways (such as filing bugs and reading and participating in mailing lists), I cannot justify hanging out on IRC in the hope that something I need to know might get discussed.

[...]

JH> If that is not the kind of OS you want, then you can pay JH> $2500.00 a pop for a much more professional one. Oh, but JH> every update cycle, they still make major changes. Look JH> at the new things added this update cycle.

I did. I read through the upstream release notes before the packages were built for CentOS. There's nothing in RH's notes about the change in YUM/up2date configuration files.

Looking at the notes again now, I see that they have lots of changelog extracts from various packages. But not for redhat-release. The CentOS release notes also don't mention the change.

JH> That might be true and MANY things are worked out devel JH> list. MANY, MANY things are discussed here. However, the JH> yum configuration files, as well as the ones for up2date JH> and any other update mechanism need to be in JH> centos-release ... and that is where they are staying.

Ultimately I don't care where the files live, but it would have been nice to have had a heads-up about the change so that my machines didn't suddenly start updating from random mirrors. And it would have been even nicer to have had some advice from the CentOS developers on the ``right way'' to change the configuration so that it wouldn't break.

JH> I apologize for not discussing this issue on this list JH> before it was done, however it is still where those files JH> belong. One of the things that is in our goals is to be JH> more like upstream. It just makes sense to do it the same JH> way where ever possible ... I am sorry that this affected JH> some power users in an unexpected way, but it is still JH> where the files belong.

As it happens, all it really did was to make my workstation and a test machine start getting packages from other mirrors, as I haven't yet rolled CentOS 4 out more widely.

I wasn't angry about the change, just a bit annoyed that I hadn't known about it beforehand and that there didn't seem to be a clear way to set things up so that they would work properly.

I think that we have that now (any of several possible solutions that include removing CentOS-Base.repo and replace with an empty file), so I'm satisfied. (Keeping the separate yumconf package would have been easier for me, but I totally understand where you're coming from in wanting to track upstream closely, and it's clear from Fedora that that's where RH is going with these files.)

I'm sorry that you and Karanbir took my and others technical criticism so personally. I *greatly* appreciate the work of the CentOS developers -- you've saved me an enormous amount of work, as the announcement of CentOS came when I was in the process of doing a major reassessment of our OS plans after Red Hat had announced the end of life of Red Hat Linux and before they'd said anything about academic pricing. CentOS allowed me to build on the work I'd already done to support deployment and maintenance instead of starting from scratch with a new distro.

At this point, we could buy licenses from RH for a much lower academic price, but the department doesn't really have that kind of money. CentOS allows me to run an OS that has better support than RH's current offerings for academia (i.e., *any*); is more up to date than some other options (e.g., Debian), but still quite stable; and also allows me to contribute something back to the community in the form of feedback and bug reports, as well as the mirror we provide for the releases and architectures that we currently run.

Thank you both for your work (as well as the other developers not participating in this thread). And thank you for your apology for not discussing the change on the list.

Claire

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire Connelly cmc@math.hmc.edu Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754 Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*