[CentOS-devel] Am I qualified to help?

Sat Jan 8 23:50:19 UTC 2011
Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro>

On 01/08/2011 09:30 PM, Hubert Bahr wrote:
> Akemi Yagi wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> Hi Akemi,
>>>
>>> On 01/06/2011 03:40 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
>>>     
>>>       
>>>> Here is a potential candidate (virt-top build bug):
>>>>
>>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=661783
>>>>
>>>> It's one of the many bugzilla reports filed by Levente Farkas and one
>>>> of the few RH responded. Apparently they included a bogus dependency
>>>> in the spec. So, the remedy is either patch the spec or add the
>>>> required package in the build environment.
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> Comment #5 from Rich clears it up quite nicely from our ( the CentOS )
>>> side of things, the upstream package was built with that dep, so we
>>> would need to as well. I havent looked at the build logs to see if there
>>>     
>>>       
> I interpret this statement to say, "if the upstream binary package is 
> buggy, CentOS must provide the same bugs."
> Personally I was hoping this would not be the case.   UpStream primarily 
> responds to users that pay for support.  As a result if the bug you 
> identified is not also identified by a "pay for support customer" it may 
> not even be considered.  I thought CentOS was only dependent on the 
> UpStream Sources, not on a recreation of their buggy build environment.
> Hubert
In several occasions, for serious offenders ( like kernel, but not only 
) Centos has provided patched packages before RH came out with theirs. 
Obviously however that those packages were not distributed as part of 
the updates repo.

And yes, even the upstream bugs must stay in the official packages. As 
Morten has very well said it, "Sometimes applications depend on a bug to 
work. If you fix it, then application behaviour would be different on 
CentOS than on upstream.". Oddly enough, I've seen that happening once 
when I tried to use my patched rpm rather than  waiting  for upstream's 
one. And no, the problem was not my patch but the different behaviour of 
the application due to not exhibiting that particular bug. Go figure...