[CentOS-devel] Policy for Ad-Hoc Upstreams: Development Hosting

[Jim Perrin]

On 10/22/2014 10:19 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Brian Stinson <bstinson at ksu.edu> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> In the CBS/Infra meeting on Monday we agreed to start a discussion here
>> on the mailing list about how to handle "ad-hoc" upstreams. An ad-hoc
>> upstream could best be described as a project we would like to ship that
>> is developed within the CentOS community (centpkg is one example).
> 
> Is there some reason the work cannot or should not go into getting the
> packages into Fedora and EPEL? I realize there's a much more
> professional relationship with RHEL now that git.centos.org is the
> RHEL 7 publication repo, and that EPEL will not publish tools that
> overlap with RHEL upstream and thus overlap with CentOS, for a lot of
> very good reasons.

For some projects, sadly yes there is. Fedora's not approved or come up
with any policy around software collections yet. For some projects that
rely heavily on software collections, this is problematic. In other
cases, the code may already be in fedora but simply needs to be 'brought
back' into the EL ecosystem. Further, things like the Xen4CentOS project
may need an updated or patched libvirt, where there may not be any
interest upstream because Xen isn't supported there.

Docker is also example of needing something newer. We're working to try
to keep an updated 'upstream' docker instance available for users who
want it. Right now in -Extras we have 0.11 (soon to be 1.1.2) in keeping
with RH, however on the community side there's a tremendous push for a
newer docker. Lokesh (the fedora dev responsible for docker) has been
working with us to ensure that we have a current build as well. In this
case the code lands upstream in fedora first, and is then built for
CentOS as appropriate.


Fedora should absolutely stay the upstream, but it doesn't always make
sense in every single case.

>> Developers of an ad-hoc upstream need some extra infra (e.g. a git repo
>> for doing active development) in addition to the dist-git repo on
>> git.centos.org where the package specs live.
>>
>> I would like to start the policy and procedure discussion with the
>> following proposals:
>>
>> - Host the ad-hoc development repositories on git.centos.org in separate
>>   Gitblit projects
>>
>> - Host the ad-hoc development repositories on Github, linked to the
>>   CentOS project group
>>
>> - Host the ad-hoc development repositories someplace else?
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Brian
> 
> It takes some work if you're overlapping the core OS packages, work
> that I'm sure CentOS developers are familiar with. I personally
> publish toolsl for that for RT version 4 and Samba version 4 at
> https://github.com/nkadel/.


It does indeed. This circles back to a discussion several months ago on
this list about tiered repositories, best practices, etc. We've known
for a while that this would come up, but before it was mostly just
discussion and theory. Now we're looking at putting it into practice
with deliverable content.



-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77