On Thursday, April 07, 2011 11:23:51 AM Brunner, Brian T. wrote:
AIUI: In previous releases, RH distributed source + patches. Starting 6.0 RH releases patched source. This makes backing out a patch, or backporting patches from future development in Fedora (e.g.) far more nightmarish than before.
This one doesn't impact the CentOS core rebuild. It would/could impact CentOSPlus. See Johnny's March 8, 2011, post on planet.centos.org
Also AIUI, it appears the (undisclosed) RH build environment changed significantly, such that generating bit-for-bit identical binaries (a CentOS objective) requires mind-reading RH folks by CentOS folks (aka reverse-engineering the undisclosed RH build environment).
This is the, IMO, primary reason things have been slower this time around.
A close secondary is the subsequent 4.9 and 5.6 upstream releases. Those were assigned a higher priority, and those are done. 4.9 is out and has been for a while, and 5.6 is syncing now. 5.6 had its share of build env/repo/root 'things' apparently as well.
So 6.0 will be out when it's ready, and that's just the way it is. I'd rather have 4.9 and 5.6 out first, and I fully support the developers' decision to do it that way, since I do have C4 and C5 servers out there, but I don't yet have a C6 server running..... And if you want to be a really early adopter, SL picked the other route, and so there is an EL6 rebuild out there to work with. That's one good thing about having the two projects separate, at least in this instance.