[CentOS-devel] Query regarding contributing RPMs to CentOS Repo

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 5:53 AM,  <ravulakollu.kumar at wipro.com> wrote:
> Hi ,
>
> We have a requirement to use kernel version 3.18.22  on top of CentOS7. We have created RPM package for Linux kernel 3.18.22 for our purpose. We would like
> to contribute the same to CentOS Repositories. My question is whether centos accepts contribution from others ?
> If so we would like to contribute our spec file and RPM.
>
> Thanks,
> Uday

That.... is so many major revisions ahead it cannot reasonably be in
the mainline kernels for CentOS. 7, which had a base kernel of 3.10.0.
Remember that CentOS, Scientific Linux, and the old Whitebox are all
rebuilds of the commercial RHEL, and RHEL has a 10 year supported
lifespan. Red Hat, upstream, *cannot* do major kernel upgrades in the
main repositories without potentially breaking core features such as
systemd, real-time kernel support, virtualization, and vendor
supported storage controllers. It takes serous testing to release a
commercial kernel, it's not cheap:

Moreover, the upstream testing for Red Hat is basically Fedora: Fedora
23, which was just released, is using kernel-4.4.0. If they need to
jump major revisions ahead, why would Red Hat or CentOS want to spend
testing, support, and development time on an intermediate kernel?

This is not to demean the potential usefulness of your work,
particularly if it enables kernel features not available in the 3.10
kernels. But perhaps you could mention why you think this particular
kernel release is useful, and why it shouldn't simply be published as,
say, a personal github source tree for people who might find it
useful?