[CentOS-devel] source code of Centos

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 9:01 PM, Rock Lee <rocklee_104 at sina.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
>      I want to make a linux OS based on Centos recently. I searched on
> Google several days, but still can't find the whole source code of Centos.
> Is there any way to get the whole source code of Centos, like android, just
> do a few command and then get the image files

The short answer is "no". CentOS is mostly a clean rebuild of RHEL,
and for their latest release, RHEL has decided to publish the publicly
available source code at https://git.centos.org/. Setting up the build
tree to build the whole thing from source, including the build
environments, is a lot of time and resources that I suspect you do
*not* want to invest months in, and it takes  hundreds if not
thousands of hours on a modest system to build that while thing from
scratch. Basically, you can do it, but you'll always be chasing
updates and errata and minor copyright or trademark or license issues
to keep it maintained.


There are several free, quite usable rebuilds of RHEL, including
CentOS and Scientific Linux (which have different policies about
add-on tools). So I urge you not to go there: if you need a few
packages modified, it should be straightforward to use "mock" to build
packages, add a yum repository at OS installation time, and pull the
relevant packages from your personal repository. This approach is very
common and can work very well. I use it to publish samba 4.1.x with
full domain controller features activated for RHEL 6 based operating
systems.