----- Original Message ----
From: R P Herrold herrold@centos.org To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Sent: Friday, July 3, 2009 6:18:15 PM Subject: [CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag
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
No Russ, not in this case. The official answer, a few days ago, took exactly one word line, and one more line (2 answers).
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)
I agree with you 100%, I understand the goal of Centos, and I use Centos because of exactly that goal of trying to be 100% RH compatible. And to take it a step further, I do relate (RH and 100% RH compatibility) with stability, stability which I rather have even at the expense of having to put up with 3 year old versions of applications such as php and others.
BUT... when someone from the Centos team makes a statement like "...latest release has many up-to-date desktop packages..." or any other statement that might imply, suggest, hint, or even smell of breaking compatibility with RH, for whatever reason, I think a lot of users will start looking for alternatives.
Again, if your goal is to be 100% compatible with RH, then RH dictates the package version. And just in case some people are not very clear on RH's goals for the foreseeable future:
"It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future."
http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-hat-desktop-syste...
This does not mean that other/extra repositories can't and don't exist, but it should always be made crystal clear (and it has been a few days ago), that the base is never compromised.
bn