Sorry, folks. I wish our release developers well, and hope that they can open up their processes to allow much needed community involvment. But I've hopped to Scientific Linux and find it much more usable due to their willingness to publish updates even without the entire new release bundled, and the much timelier updates from the upstream vendor. php53 and bind97 are directly available for their verison 5.x release, and their version 6.0 has now taken over my testing environments. This makes EPEL's version of drupal, and various Samba 4 testing accessible, and I don't have to waste my time on backports that will be replaced by a release that is further, and further, and further behind.
Perhaps in the future the configuration of the build and patch environments can be opened up, or the patching going on for the package rebundling can be published in just the way people with RHEL would publish their kernel patches, rather than presenting merely the results. But such ideas have been rejected as unnecessary, and even the suggestion was rejected with hostility.
I know very well how much work such projects take, and regret that I was unable to assist further. My tweaks and bundles will now be going over to Fedora and Scientific Linux, rather than here or in the developer's list.
Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com