[CentOS-devel] Re: centos-d] CentOS Plus / CentOS Extras Policy

Tue Dec 20 13:43:40 UTC 2005
R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Karanbir Singh wrote:

> I dont like the idea of time only moving to stable. if  no one is eager 
> enough to test the pkg - maybe we dont need it in the first place :) If we 
> dont get any feedback for the pkg - maybe the developer who built it / 
> pkg'ed it - should request specific feedback ?

concur +1

> I worry about the fact that even 1 loose pkg out there, can break a _lot_ of 
> people's setup, we have a *lot* of people know using CentOSPLus and Extras 
> is enabled by default .... Personally, I would be much happier if atleast a 
> couple of people had the 'it works' feedback to provide before it gets moved 
> over.

concur plus LOTS

cAos 1 had this happen with an innocent novice packager in 
cAos 1 that was not watched [closely enough as it turns out in 
hindsight], and whose work was not tested other than against a 
few packages; his work entered a yumable state, and it 
poisoned the entire distribution release.

The collateral damage which resulted essentially killed cAos-1 
development;  I took a couple of runs of trying to get a 
yum-able migration path out, but as Gnomish (/me turns to the 
side and spits) elements had some false cross- 
Requires/Provides into Python (/me repeats the prior action);
as yum and Python are joined at the hip, it could not be 
solved.

The mess was so bad that the cAos group lost all momentum, and 
eventually walked away from that failed orphan.  Just earlier 
this week, Greg had to maunally solve a injudicously 
kard-coded Requires/Provides pair, as a blocker had again 
slipped in [which also indicates a fault in the release 
protocol of not running a repocheck still exists].

While it may be acceptible to a bleeding edge distribution to 
experiment, it is so far from the Centos purposes, that I 
wonder if automatic promotion  is ever worth the risk for a 
production distribution. I think not.

-- Russ Herrold