On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
In all fairness to all the rebels, if somebody from the Cento's team would have responded in a timely matter to the original yes/no question of this thread,
... and an allegedly 'yes or no' question can take three and a half 24 line screens to set forth? The world is not so simple
The CentOS project team strives to issue a product and update stream that replicates, substantially exactly, warts and all, its upstream from freely available sources, to yield binaries which are ABI indistinguishable, with a couple of exceptions. These relate to eliding trademarked matter and replacing it with CentOS trademarked and copyrighted art; and providing a suitable updater mechanism (as the sources for the server side of 'up2date' are not FOSS and have not been released -- at all when the project started, and still not in full even to the present day)
The 'base product' variant that does this is the 'base' and 'updates' archives. The end user of CentOS may choose to add other archives (with varying results), either officially from CentOS mirrors [plus, testing, and adjuncts for various upstream products not in mainline]; from individual archives published by present or former CentOS team members [KB's, DAG, then RPMforge, elRepo]; or from non-affiliated persons [Atomic Rocket Turtle, EPEL]
Customized 'one disk' installers, or live CD's have been tried by the project from time to time; ditto testing extensions to architectures not supported upstream (and frankly, probably lacking sufficient mass to be viable [I am in process on a local 5.3 s390x port, in my idle moments, for relaxation])
The membership of the CentOS team has waxed and waned over time. The project is a confluence of a sub-project under the cAos project, some participants in a 'Enterprise Linux Rebuild' mailing list, and other standalone projects. New project team members are added by invitation and largely represent a meritocracy, run in a self-perpetuating fashion. CentOS is not Fedora, OpenSuSE, or any other distribution, and is not 'beholden' to any outside organization
The heart and core of the distribution is those (very few core team) members able to cause the relevant CentOS private key to 'sign' binary RPH packages; scarcely less important is the mirror distribution network, and the seamless coverage and scaling which we have been able to achive with the help of the mirror members. I stop here, as the contributions are too numerous to mention
Demonstrating competence in the support functions is readily approachable, and a good way to 'join' the work of the project -- IRC, forums, wiki, mailing lists -- and as I mentioned in a earlier post to this list, noticed and noted as to character and quality. People adding value are often offered a change to undertake increasingly more critical contributions to the project
-- Russ herrold