[CentOS-devel] Re: Third repos CentOS 5 compatibility

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Mon May 7 14:57:52 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 07:38 -0300, Durval Menezes wrote:
> Folks, 
> 
> For what's worth, IMO there is at least one thing we at Centos-devel
> could learn from EPEL: they have very clear rules about how to get
> contributed packages into their repo:
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#head-24b4e4b98953a6d3de80019e85e831128d47bb81
> 
> I for one have some packages (http://www.durval.com.br/RPMS/el4/)
> I've been trying to contribute to CentOS for many months now, without
> success: I've posted messages trying to submit the packages, talked to
> some developers, even started a page on the CentOS Wiki about it, but
> in the end it came to naught (I privately received information from
> one developer explaining why there are no clear rules, but I was asked
> to keep it confidential and so I can't post it here).
> 
> This is very frustrating, and I think it keeps many people from
> contributing to CentOS.

I don't have anything nice to say ... so I won't say anything except
this:

When a package is released by CentOS ... one of the current developers
is using it and we KNOW it works.

We are not looking to replace RPMForge, ATRPMS, KBS Extras, etc.  CentOS
has some repositories to provide Enterprise software (CentOS Extras,
CentOS Plus).  We are not trying to make those like the Ubuntu universe
repos.

RPMForge, KBS Extras and ATRPMS are the place for finding items we don't
have.

I will also say that we don't just grab someone off the street to become
a Developer ... but we do add people (the number of developers has moved
from 4 or 5 to 15 in the 2 last years).

We are currently adding Daniel DeKoK ... in the not so distant past we
added Dag Wieers and others.

However, CentOS is designed to be Enterprise and provide support for 7
years ... what is going to happen when you decide that you no longer
want to support your software?  That is right .. I GET TO SUPPORT IT FOR
7 YEARS.

Wait and see what happens when some of these "so called" extras packages
move on past the version of python, glibc, php, etc. and fail to compile
on the el4 or el5 target.

EPEL is a great idea ... but I want to see what happens when it gets
hard.  I want to see what drops and what doesn't when the project
upstream moves to requireing php5 or python-2.4; what are the el4 guys
going to do.  In CentOS, we try to support what we have and we have made
a 7 year commitment.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes



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