On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 13:54 +0200, Dag Wieers wrote:
On Mon, 16 May 2011, Johnny Hughes wrote:
It will be released when it is released, if you don't like it then leave.
Before I leave this list let me take you back about 7 years to the Whitebox mailinglist. You may not remember that Whitebox had a list of issues of its own, no timely updates, no community effort, lack of good communication. It was mostly a one-man-effort.
And the people on that list who were not pleased, included Johnny and Karanbir. And it's striking (and ironic) how similar the discussions went 7 years ago. Johnny said:
[WBEL-users] WBEL Vs Centos ? :-S http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004761.html
"If timely updates are not a key factor for you, then WBEL is a great distro. If timely updates are the most important thing you consider about the distro you want, then WBEL might not be a fit for you. That is all I have ever said ... and I have never said it meanly."
or:
[WBEL-users] WBEL Vs Centos ? :-S http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004740.html
"I just think people should not have the expectation the WBEL is community operated, it is not. It's NOT like debian or gentoo where others can get involved. I know, I tried really hard to do so many times.
Karanbir said:
[WBEL-users] WBEL ...dead? http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004684.html
"Be a lil difficult to sell that to the IT Manager / CTO : Hang tight dude, its comming. Anytime now."
or:
[WBEL-users] WBEL ...dead? http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/2004-December/004709.html
"Why ? the other RHEL recompiles dont have this 'its coming, hang on' attitude do they ?
If there is a security issue out there, you can put in a fairly good idea as to when its possible to deploy with them. Whats the scene with WBEL ?"
The only difference I see is that back then Whitebox had only a fraction of users, and even less using it for critical mission, while nowadays people rely even more on timely security updates and releases coming from CentOS. And people expect to help and contribute to the process to make that happen.
---- The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Those of us who were whitebox users surely remember how the updates came slower and slower and our sense of frustration of never knowing how/if/when the updates would come. Your reminder (because I had forgotten) that they used timeliness as the main selling point for switching to CentOS well... if that isn't a wake up call to Johnny & Karanbir, then nothing will do it.
At least John Morris never made any pretense of whitebox being a community project nor did he promise updates to be anything except on his own timetable. I remember how awkward I felt when Johnny would use the WBEL mail list to suggest to people to switch to CentOS and laughed the other day when he was rather perturbed because the CentOS list was used to promote the idea of switching to SL. More irony.
I resolved to not install WBEL 4.0 on any system because I couldn't trust it to be timely and now, here we are at 6.0 and I feel the same way about CentOS. Full circle.
The sycophants on this list probably don't recognize just how valuable the 'dag' repo (aka rpmforge) has been to the RHEL/CentOS/SL/etc. ecosystem but my feeling is that if Dag can't hold the CentOS dev's feet to the fire, then no one can. Evidently I am one of the "ungrateful bastards" http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-May/111670.html but you could never be considered to be one of them.
Craig