[CentOS-devel] CentOS stream meeting - update

Wed Oct 9 12:44:13 UTC 2019
Jim Perrin <jperrin at centos.org>


On 10/9/19 8:19 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 12:57 PM Jim Perrin <jperrin at centos.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
> 


Quite the opposite actually. Most of this meeting dealt with internal 
policy, which is something companies don't realistically share. Rich's 
email covered it well.


>>>> 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.

It implies that RH would like the community to focus on the latest 
release rather than previous iterations, nothing more nefarious than that.


> 
>>>> 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.


This is the sort of thing you could expect from Stream, yes.


-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
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