[CentOS-devel] CentOS-4.9 SRPMS

On Feb 19, 2011, at 3:00 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> If you can not figure out how to rebuild the OS after the things I just
> gave you, then you are an idiot.  You are too stupid to be in this
> thread.  Unplug your dang computer, put it back in the box and ship it
> back to where you bought it and give us a freaking break.


Wow.

I subscribed to this list last week because I was curious to know the status of the CentOS 6 release.  My perception of the CentOS release process before joining this list was that it wasn't well described, status updates were not given, and it was somewhat slow and ad hoc.  (What was up with the call for votes on 5.6 v. 6? And where were the results posted?)  Perceptions can of course be wrong.

Every machine in our company runs CentOS from developer machines, to servers (DHCPd, Bind, Kerberos, etc.) to our cluster and AMIs except for a couple of Solaris and Windows servers.  We use CentOS because it is the right price and meets our virtualization requirements unlike some of the other OSes did back when we made the decision to adopt CentOS uniformly. A lot of us miss having the bells and whistles found on Fedora or Ubuntu but it's something we must live with given our IT resources.

So after watching for a week or so--albeit during a tense time in the release cycle--I have some observations and recommendations:
1. Johnny Hughes, you would do CentOS well to mind your words. Or better yet, don't respond to threads asking about the process or release status.  Instead, take half a day and write up a description of it.
2. The CentOS process is opaque and secretive. It may indeed be very complex with justifiable restrictions over who can contribute at what level, but the process should be described somewhere. This would also help impartial observers/users of CentOS understand why things take as long as they do. The process and team appear to be dysfunctional to the point that using CentOS may be a risk.
3. A lot of people are frustrated with the level and type of communication from the CentOS inner circle. Increasing the level of communication--including release status--and politeness would be good for CentOS.

A few days on this list was enough to give me a fresh interest in finding an alternative to CentOS.

With that I bid you all good luck and thanks for five year of CentOS. 

		Rich