On Sun, 22 May 2011, Steven Crothers wrote:
I think you're missing the point, if you read between the lines, the complaint I see is that CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) is not community based whatsoever.
I don't mind-read as to what a third party meant so well as you, it seems
My intent with cAos (post fedora.us), and with CentOS was to keep available for the FOSS development community at large, the fruit of the distribution integration represented in the 'testers-list' non-public beta group for the former RHL, and the years of work represented there, by people both outside and inside Red Hat. It initially appeared that there would not be a binary form integrated distribution in RPM packaged form. Greg of cAos indeed re-worked a fairly initial installer called 'cinch'
It was not at all clear that Red Hat would not threaten litigation to close such efforts down. They had made such threats previously to one of the other co-founders of the CentOS sub-project of cAos, as to a RHL rebuild and respin he had marketed
To suggest that CentOS is 'not community based whatsoever' will come as a great surprise to the donors of bug triage effort, of mirroring effort, of wiki authoring, of forum participation, of live-CD 'mixing', and so forth
But as hughesjr mentioned just last week, letting random people (seemingly a 'community of random and untrusted persons') feed content that would end up signed in the CentOS project's name, is simply not going to happen. CentOS has never been about that
A 'vetting' and reputation system was proposed in some early design documents for fedora.us, but that project lacked the mass to make it work; cAos tried a variation of this, and encountered a problem with its v.2 when a novice packager inadvertently introduced a 'one way' library version bump, impairing the maintainability of that release going forward; The ATrpms v. DAG archive approach on pushing new versions of certain core packages shows two approaches, and the DAG non-invasive approach is clearly the mind-share winner -- We've [the third-party packaging community] (at least, I've been in projects that have) tried variants of 'anyone's code is welcome' distribution adjunct preparation before, and it does not work well
CentOS binaries creation process is by and large is a very literal and non-creative effort
If people want to start their own rebuild efforts, peace be with them, and good luck. But fostering spin-off's is not what CentOS is about -- and people railing to the heavens about how unfair it is that THEIR false expectations (based on some amorphous vision of how great something COULD be, if only ... ) are not met by the CentOS core team, are simply making noise here
-- Russ herrold