at the risk of picking at that scab a bit longer, i'm going to toss out a comment regarding people still waiting for the public availability of centos 5.4.
here:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-October/083743.html
we read:
"The last status (from twitter) is 2 days old with the '5.4 is baked! centos internal network will start syncing up today. Release ~ soon!'. Any ETA?"
followed by the response:
"Just relax and wait, this is a _volunteer_ based project. Want a release date? Go pay for RHEL."
not to put too find a point on it, but that reply is more than a bit dickish. it doesn't *matter* if it's a volunteer project. as i see this, this is turning into an issue of credibility.
once someone posts that the 5.4 release is allegedly "baked" and syncing is beginning, then it's not unreasonable that people will start getting anxious to see it hit the mirrors. and as the days go by, it's not unreasonable for those people to start wondering what the heck is going on.
again, whether people are being paid to do any of this work is not relevant. it's important, from the perspective of reputation, that everyone see the centos project as being efficiently and competently run, and making what *appears* to be an announcement of completion and the beginning of syncing servers, followed by days of awkward silence and increasingly defensive rhetoric, is not the way to do it. it just looks bad.
rday --
======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.
Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ========================================================================