On Sat, April 4, 2015 4:47 am, Karanbir Singh wrote:

On 04/04/15 00:13, Always Learning wrote:

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Posted on behalf of Mark (m.roth@5-cent.us) who is currently experiencing technical difficulties with his Internet connection

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On Fri, 2015-04-03 at 11:23 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:

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I really think that if someone is actually interested in helping the

project, rather than being a backseat driver and griping at every change ........

Y'know, the whole thread with the naming, and the comments that it had been discussed, but only on the devel list, and the talk of an "ambassador" or whatever....

Couldn't some upcoming change like this have been mentioned in centos-announcements, and make sure it went to all the centos mailman lists?

I am going to be on the move the next few days for personal reasons, and will catchup with the threads and comments as soon as i am able to.

however, i want everyone to sit back and reflect on what they are doing here - make sure you are not creating noise for the sake of creating noise. As we all are well aware, there is a tendency on this list for people to get completely carried away and lose the ability to have a meaningful conversation.

I will try to guess what upsets many people.

I remember long ago one of sysadmins was explaining to his user what CentOS is: "it is binary replica of RedHat Enterprise Linux". I hope, this doesn't offend anybody. That was reasonably true, and CentOS was immediately carrying same trust, reliability and respect in person's mind as RHEL does. (I remember my friend sysadmin whose machines run Debian was regenerating all keys and certificates after known flop when in Debian in random numbers generator significant portion of code was commented out for debugging and left like that in releases for years... A said then: what a good choice of system was the one I made: I never remember a flop like that made by RedHat).

Now the change is happening (or already happened). CentOS grew out of being "binary replica". Does it mean it became worse? By no means no! Does it mean it is what it was in the past and carries the same respect as RHEL has? No. But last doesn't matter much to rather big crowd of people who think about RHEL after their release 7 differently (some quite differently).

All in all CentOS seems to become distribution though based on RHEL, still having a bunch of extra nice stuff. Great thing all in all. Those who are upset may follow their former experience. I remember we were running RehHat (remember free RedHat, which lasted until version 9? You can buy a boxed set of CDs at a cost of CDs.) Then RedHat stopped doing that and we switched to Fedora (pilot project running in front of RedHat Enterprise). Not for long, as you wouldn't like short life cycle of system for your machine. This last thing might have depleted the size of Fedora community, maybe in favor of CentOS. And it is a community effort that RedHat was always efficiently using to cook nice system on the basis of (and they were always extremely good in my recollection in following GNU license and releasing all source!). If my guess above is close to reality, then having CentOS as a pilot project running in front of RHEL will be very beneficial. (Not that Fedora outlived itself as such, it still is great project, but CentOS may be good addition in that respect).

Again, all above is something I tried to speculate together just for my understanding of what I observe (and should be taken with a grain of salt, as neither my observations are good, nor my thinking is).

Valeri

PS I have to add the following in case someone recognizes me as one of CentOS public mirror maintainers. As such (a public mirror maintainer), no matter that some scepticism might sound in what I'm saying, I'll keep maintaining CentOS public mirror (and vault mirror). I will keep maintaining the mirrors as long as the mirror machine (hosting multitude of other mirrors) exists, which will be while I have a sysadmin position at this university. We have benefited from CentOS for quite some time, and maintaining public mirror "forever" is that little that we can do for the great project (and yes, many of our machines still run CentOS, and will for quite some time to come...)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++