[CentOS-devel] I want to help

Wed Mar 30 13:57:28 UTC 2011
Tom Sorensen <tsorensen at gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 6:26 AM, Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011, R P Herrold wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011, Marian Marinov wrote:
>>
>>> Here is the first part of the article( the one that made me
>>> ask if I can help): ...
>>
>> People who wander in after reading a month old article and do
>
> The LWN article mentioned is a fresh one. Here it is:

To be clear -- the OP posted within a few hours of the article being
published. It was hardly a "month old article".

>> This is not the time for such efforts, and as indicated by the first
>> post mentioned, not the venue, either
>
> If this is not the venue, there is no venue.

Fully agreed.

> And regarding time, the project has missed the opportunities the past 3
> years to fix the issues. Besides the issues only appear when it's not the
> time to discuss them.

Excepting the 4.9 release, which was extremely timely, point releases
have been slipping more and more. The slippage for 5.6 is now nearly 3
months (RHEL 5.6 was released Jan 13, 2011). The slippage for 6.0 is
nearly 5 months (RHEL 6 was released on Nov 10, 2010), and it's pretty
much guaranteed that RH will release 6.1 before CentOS releases 6.0.

Claiming that the CentOS dev team does not need help building and that
the build process has not become more complicated would appear to be
untrue. But those of us on the outside have to guess at this because
there is absolutely no transparency about the build process. All we've
been told about the 5.6 delays are that there were "niggles". That's
great -- exactly what niggles? What's blown up? Why is none of this
public? THAT is what people are becoming increasingly discontent about
-- a Community project that does not have any real interaction with
the community. Too much is happening behind closed doors, and while I
don't expect anything to change for 5.6 or 6.0 (or 6.1 at this point),
there needs to be work done toward rectifying this when everyone is
not busy as hell with new releases.

Rejecting offers for help in such an offhand way is really just
poisoning the well -- I know several people who are extremely
qualified for rebuilding efforts that will not work with CentOS
because of such offhand dismissals. And, frankly, it's becoming
extremely reminiscent of the final days of Whitebox before the CentOS
project began. Yes, that's harsh, but the parallels are there.

Tom Sorensen