On 03/21/2011 08:07 AM, Jason Pyeron wrote: > I think I was misunderstood. Our concern is to have the latest from the upstream > vendor available as soon as possible. > We run about 30-40 centos systems and about the same in RHEL, it is difficult > when there are differences. Since we are not distributing, we often recompile > (without modification) SRPMs and add them to our local yum repo as a stop gap. > > Other times were are implementing a bugfix, or feature for a given customer, we > know are way around the few packages we deal with every day. > > I think it would be nice, if our efforts were in sync with this group and > benefited everyone. I'm completely unaffiliated w/ CentOS development but I think that while your offer of assistance is greatly appreciated, it's likely somewhat outside of what the issues that the CentOS team actually faces. Rebuilding an SRPM is really a non-issue, and I doubt that it's even CPU cycles that is a major factor with getting out an update - especially when it's just updates vs. a entirely new version of the OS. The issue/challenge/difficulty is with rebuilding the SRPM, ensuring the binary compatibility w/ upstream (were there missing build-reqs that now made the CentOS version not include some files or have library/binary differences), trademark issues, other quirks such as abrt wanting to send traces to RH's bugzilla). For a simple package where rpmbuild --rebuild pkg.src.rpm is sufficient, there's really nothing to the process. I suspect that while the CentOS team could release some of the updates to 5.5 and/or 5.6 even though the full 5.6 release hasn't occurred yet, these updates are held back in the event that an issue is discovered that requires a rebuild of a package that was thought to be correct and already released. There really is no provision for 'errata' to packages since if upstream releases pkg-1.0-2, CentOS can't push out pkg-1.0-3 since that now creates differences between upstream. That being said, they have put out the bind97 and php53 packages, but only in the c5-testing repo allowing for users that should understand what they are undertaking to test/utilize them without affecting the general userbase.