[CentOS-devel] C8 updates / CentOS-announce

[Kevin Stange]

On 11/5/19 12:17 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote:
> On 05/11/2019 18:38, Kevin Stange wrote:
>> On 11/1/19 2:06 PM, Brian Stinson wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2019, at 13:41, Leon Fauster via CentOS-devel wrote:
>>>> Do package updates for C8 get announced via centos-announce list?
>>>
>>> We are not doing announcement emails for C8 updates at this time. There are feeds at  https://feeds.centos.org/ if you would like to subscribe there.
>>
>> Can you provide some details as to how this is managed and generated?
>> Is there an entry limit, or how long will package updates appear in
>> these feeds?  Is it possible to continue to provide a link to the
>> upstream errata notification or at least provide a matching ID number?
>>
>> The way this looks right now this will actually be more difficult to
>> work with than just scraping the mailing list has been for CentOS 6 and
>> 7.  It's nice seeing the RPM %changelog in the description, but
>> everything else is worse from my perspective.
>>
> 
> No secret sauce for the rss feeds , just repo-rss from yum-utils that is
> ran against repositories :)
> So a little bit of jinja2 in the ansible role and it's done :
> https://github.com/CentOS/ansible-role-httpd-feeds/blob/master/templates/rss-generator.j2#L10
> 
> We can easily bump the number of entries that repo-rss would generate if
> that helps ?

I'm not sure it really helps unless there is no limit because in some
cases a single SRPM will produce more than 20 distinct packages and then
you won't even get the full update history if you're polling constantly.
 CentOS often releases several updates at once, and it's not uncommon to
see 50+ distinct RPMs released within a few hours.

I don't understand the goal of this replacing the mailing list posts
with this.  It means we no longer have any persistent notification or
metadata for updates unless we watch the actual repos or build systems
directly.  This feels like a huge regression from what we have been
getting for CentOS 7 and older.

If you provided a persistent updateinfo.xml in the repos instead of
sending the emails that would at least be equivalent coverage (and
community members have been asking for this for ~10 years), but this
strange RSS thing isn't getting us close to either that or what we had
before.

-- 
Kevin Stange
Chief Technology Officer
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