[CentOS-devel] C8 updates / CentOS-announce

[Kevin Stange]

On 11/5/19 4:06 PM, Fabian Arrotin wrote:
> On 05/11/2019 20:41, Kevin Stange wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Nobody ever said it was a replacement ;-)
> https://feeds.centos.org is there for quite some time, so even before 8
> was even just a concept :)
> I think that Johnny said he can't at this stage find a way to send
> relevant informations through mails .. but if someone can come with a
> solution, I'm sure he'll be happy to consider and plumb such solution in
> his release plan.
> 

I've helped figure out some of the plumbing before!  Glad to hear this
isn't a policy change, but I wish it was better communicated that help
was needed in finding a solution to continue what was status quo.  I'll
talk to Johnny about the process and see what can be done.

Thanks.

-- 
Kevin Stange
Chief Technology Officer
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