[CentOS-devel] Confusing package versioning

Fri May 6 22:23:33 UTC 2011
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 05/06/2011 04:58 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> On 05/06/2011 03:43 PM, Charlie Brady wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 6 May 2011, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>
>>> Millions of users have built scripts that depend on certain rules, like
>>> our use of dist tags, to remain constant.
>>
>> Millions? Really? And you made promises that your use of dist tags would 
>> remain constant?
> 
> We explained how we do dist tags, yes.  We said .el<X>.centos would be
> used for packages that are modified.
> 
> CentOS has millions of users, yes.  The current estimate is somewhere
> around 4 million.
> 
> CentOS is installed on more Web servers that Fedora and Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux combined:
> 
> Centos:  29.2% (Linux), 9.3% (Entire Web)
> RHEL:    14.5% (Linux), 4.6% (Entire Web)
> Fedora:  6.5% (Linux), 2.1% (Entire Web)
> 
> So yes, Charlie, there are millions of machines that use CentOS.
> 
> At least 8 of the top 500  super computers in world run CentOS.
> 
> Almost everyone one of them has some kind of script written for it.  Do
> all of them care about dist tag.  Of course not.
> 
> However, if we make a major change (like changing our dist tag), we have
> no idea how it will impact people.  What kind of puppet deploy rules out
> there might have .el5.centos in their rules?  How about cobbler?  What
> about people's kickstarts?  How about the guys that use spacewalk.  What
> about the major corporation that pulls out all the .centos files and
> replaces those with their own, etc.
> 
> I know how it will impact me personally ... it will require several
> python, bash and perl scripts to be rewritten in the system that we use
> to build, mirror, and distribute CentOS.  It will impact everything from
> the scripts that we use to pull down files from upstream and where they
> get put to how we check files against each other, to how we send e-mails
> to the announce list, etc., etc.
> 
> Who knows the impact on the Example ISP who is host 50,000 CentOS
> servers using CPanel or the Example2 ISP that does all their machines on
> xen VMs ahd deploys with cobbler.  What about the OSes that use CentOS
> as a basis for them (ClearOS, Rocks Clusters, etc.).
> 
> The point is, we can't just change things mid stream because we have no
> idea what scripts and software from which users might do something with
> dist tag.
> 
> I can tell you that when Red Hat changed the way they did dist tag, it
> had a major impact on the CentOS Project.  We changing our dist tag
> could have the same kind of impact on others.  9.3% of the world's
> Internet runs on CentOS.  9.3% ... quite a lot.

Here are a couple other references:

Amazon EC2:
http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/04/25/2011/Meet-Tanuki-ten-thousand-core-supercomputer-in-cloud.html

Ranger:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/lone_ranger





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