On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 18:08 +0200, Simon J Mudd wrote:
mailing-lists@hughesjr.com (Johnny Hughes) writes:
[snip changes]
I assume from the comment that you make that these changes WILL be different to the versions expected to be distributed by RedHat?
I currently follow CentOS because it's stable and BECAUSE it very closely tracks RedHat's RHEL versions.
If you decide that you want to distribute newer versions of certain packages would it not be better to provide them separately (perhaps in "vendor specific" (vendor=CentOS) tree? This means that we can if needed maintain compatibility with RHEL or if needed follow the newer versions in a controlled way.
Building mozilla, firefox, thunderbird or openoffice this way ALSO allows standard RHEL users to use the CentOS packages if they so choose thus potentially gaining you more "users" and also allowing CentOS to provide "added value" to RHEL.
OK ... just for the record, we do have this ... so let me plug the CentOSPlus repository.
Distinguishing the rpms could be done by: prefixing a centos-packagename to the rpm name and perhaps prefixing the install path to a more appropriate location which could be sym linked to the vendor location if needed (via the alternatives system?)
We are not going to provide alternate locations, however we do provide fully functional items in our CentOSPlus repository. The items in CentOSPlus are upgrades to their counterparts in the base distro (for users who want the offered upgrades). Currently, it upgrades the Kernel (adds xfs, reiserfs, jfs, ntfs, firewire, etc.), php-5, postfix with mysql support, firefox and a new rdesktop. For more info about CentOSPlus, see this readme:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/Readme.txt
<snip>
We also have a testing repo that contains some other items which are new and could be upgrades to current packages. Items in Testing will go into either the Extras Repo or the CentOSPlus Repo ...
For information on all the CentOS repos, check here:
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories
and here:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/Readme.txt
I do appreciate the work being done by the CentOS developers and am sure that others do too, but I think that one of the reasons people follow CentOS is because it is a RHEL clone and expect it to behave as such. Starting to diverge from that premise may not be a good idea.
As I said before, we would never, EVER, diverge from the base upstream packages except as it has to do with trademark removal or subscription services to provide updates ... except as we do in CentOSPlus repository, where you make a conscious choice to upgrade certain packages.