On 07/09/2011 01:32 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
yes, we all clearly take that on board - I hope the changes we are bringing in helps clear that, and prevent this sort of a situation. But there are still lots of places for improvements, and over the next few months lets try and address all of those.
- KB
Sorry for thread-jacking, but I wanted to start this thread in relation to your comment.
As I understand it, a lot of the delay came from reproducing Red Hat's build environment. That being needed for the binary compatibility. With each new major release, the number of packages, and in turn, the amount of complexity grows.
Is that a correct understanding? If so, then EL7 will be even harder to sort out and will lead to an even longer delay in release.
I think there is a business case to be made for CentOS, from the point of view of Red Hat. My experience has been that a lot of people/companies start out on CentOS. After a while, those that succeed and do well eventually want to switch to Red Hat proper. As good as CentOS is, by it's very nature, it will always lag behind RHEL in so far as updates are concerned.
Given all this; I think there is an argument for Red Hat wanting to assist CentOS. As we saw with this release, the delay drove people away from EL. I am sure many went to Debian or other non-EL distributions. Each of these defections is another potential future customer lost to Red Hat.
If Red Hat could be convinced to help the CentOS team with things like setting up their build environment, they would help foster this potential customer base while investing minimal time and effort. Has anyone in the CentOS team approached Red Hat to discuss some sort of arrangement like this?
As an anecdotal example; We've built our entire infrastructure on CentOS. Now, our clients who are doing well, we are moving to Red Hat proper while still using a lot of CentOS internally and for smaller clients. It's a very smooth fit and transition, thanks to CentOS's binary compatibility.
Just an idea. Thanks for the hard work and I'm anxious to play with CentOS 6!