[CentOS-devel] CentOS stream meeting - update

On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 12:57 PM Jim Perrin <jperrin at centos.org> wrote:
>
>
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> On 10/8/19 11:46 AM, James Cassell wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, at 11:37 AM, Rich Bowen wrote:
> >> Last week a group of Red Hat engineers, management, and members of the
> >> CentOS and Fedora communities, met at the Red Hat office in Boston to
> >> discuss how to implement CentOS Stream and formally kick-off the
> >> project, which, as you are aware, was announced the week before. Many
> >> details that were omitted in the original announcement were debated, and
> >> we came to an agreement on much, but not all, of these things.
> >>
> >
> > Great!  Was this a public or invite-only meeting? (I didn't see anything in my mail archives announcing it.)
> >
>
> This meeting was an internal RH meeting to sort out some of the
> internal-to-redhat pieces, but we're working from a policy of being as
> open and transparent about it as possible.

Then we already have something to be worried about. The meeting wasn't
open, wasn't announced to the public, and the attendees and content of
the meeting is unavailable to the public. Not a good start to a
"transparent as possible" process.

> >> Q: How many streams will there be? Will there be a stream for 8 and
> >> another for 9?
> >> A: When the development for RHEL 9 begins, the stream for 8 will end. We
> >> plan to have a one-year overlap, to allow for transition from one stream
> >> to the other. But we do not intend to keep the 8 Stream going for the
> >> entirety of the RHEL 8 support window.

This implies that development of new features or backported features
for RHEL 8 will end as soon as RHEL 9 is released. That is.... likely
to be a problem.

> >> Q: How can I contribute changes?
> >> A: This is still being worked on, and we ask for your patience as we
> >> work towards this. This is indeed a goal, but getting the stream itself
> >> working perfectly must happen first. Meanwhile, we’re working with the
> >> RHEL engineering team on a process where contributions from the
> >> community can be considered as part of their regular development
> >> workflow. The last thing we want is to set an expectation that we cannot
> >> meet, so we want to ensure that we have a workable process before we
> >> start asking you for contributions.
> >>
> >> We encourage your further questions, and look forward to figuring out
> >> with you how to make CentOS Stream successful for all constituents.
> >>
> >
> > I look forward to the further details as they become available.
>
>
> We'll be open about what we're working on, but I do want to point out
> that for some of this will only be "we're sorting out internal RH
> policy" or whatever.

We just saw this sort of thing play out with the release of the
python3 for RHEL 7.7. It would have been nice to see those in a
"Stream" channel, if this is going to be the way major features get
rolled out.