[CentOS-devel] Am I qualified to help?

Sun Jan 9 04:53:07 UTC 2011
Hubert Bahr <hab at hbahr.org>

Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>
>>>> 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...
>   
I can understand this position.  However, could one still use the CentOS 
developers mailing list, and bugs.centos.org to share info about bugs 
discovered and their fixes so the users of CentOS would have a forum to 
share their problems and solutions while waiting on UpStream to provide 
"official fix".  I personally do not like using packages that cannot be 
rebuilt from the distributions repository.  I prefer to know that the 
source provided for the package can build it.  Thus if I need to branch 
from it for my own applications I can blame any problems in a branched 
build on my own changes.  I understand that there should be other 
locations for sharing full source/binarys other than the "CentOS 
Distribution" but having patches organized in the CentOS Bug Tracker as 
well as reporting them upstream could be valuable.

Hubert
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