[CentOS-devel] progress?

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Fri Feb 18 17:46:06 UTC 2011


On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, Lamar Owen wrote:

> On Friday, February 18, 2011 11:36:18 am Steve Meyers wrote:
>> On 2/18/11 9:32 AM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
>>> 1. Contribute your time and knowledge to that project.
>>
>> I get the impression that there are a lot of people that would like to
>> do so, but don't know how.  I think that's partly what Dag is
>> complaining about as well.
>
> There is a tab on the centos wiki (wiki.centos.org) that says 
> Contribute.  This links to http://wiki.centos.org/Contribute and 
> describes the useful beginning contributions.
>
> On the subject of useful contributions, I for one don't want some J 
> Random Hacker building packages for direct distribution on CentOS. 
> There must be a vetting process.

Oh the irony. I started that wiki page !

But if you look closely, you will notice that none of what is listed there 
really benefits the CentOS release process. The very heart of what CentOS 
does is a guarded bastion with only a few people involved. A few more 
people get QA access, but we wouldn't want too much testing, would we ?

So the process doesn't scale, and everyone waiting for the next 
release or security update feels powerless to help there where it could be 
useful because the tools, the process and the changes are hidden.

This means that even though I am not even interested to have access to the 
keys or to push a package, one cannot help with tool development to 
automate the process better (think binary-compatibility testing) or with 
build-problems (there are no build problems!) or with help finding 
trademark problems. Or with many other things that are currently lacking, 
but would fit the CentOS project (eg. rebuilding the various channel 
packages, fastrack, ...)

But you are right, I should probably stop sending cynical messages. I 
simply do care about the project. I had a hard time keeping quiet for more 
than a year, but here we are in the same situation we were in 2009 and 
2010 and we haven't learned a thing :-/

We could be doing a better job, but we aren't...

-- 
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, info at dagit.net, http://dagit.net/

[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]



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