[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the RHEL platform

On 25.12.2020 08:05, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 3:59 PM redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel 
> <centos-devel at centos.org <mailto:centos-devel at centos.org>> wrote:
>      > At that point, is the question you're asking whether or not the
>     CentOS
>      > kernel should be a rebuild of an RHEL kernel SRPM?  These don't
 seem
>      > like questions that the CentOS maintainers would have ever even
>     accepted
>      > for consideration.
> 
>     In normal times, I wouldn't think of suggesting this.
> 
>     The year of 2020 is clearly not normal times.
> 
>     CentOS Stream is a new age.  We are the upstream now.  We should be
>     able to choose the kernel and the quality level of the SRPM.
> 
>     I believe what makes something CentOS is the governance.
> 
>     Red Hat's behavior makes it clear they believe what make something
>     CentOS is who owns the trademark.  That they can lie about the
>     governance rules to get whatever they want.
> 
>     This militant attitude on the part of Red Hat and the fraudulent
>     governance board deserves an equally militant response.
> 
>     Time fix the openness gap for the kernel SRPM for real instead of
>     blindly following Karsten Wade's empty posturing in the name of
>     openness.
> 
>     Let's also fix the availability gap.  Karsten Wade vision for CentOS
>     Stream is that 95% is good enough.  For every 1 million users there
>     are 50,000 that have their needs fall through the cracks.  I think
>     as a community we can provide better results than that.
> 
>     Both openness gap and availability gap are worthy things to fix so
>     let's fix them.  But Karsten Wade isn't offering an effective fix
>     for those issues.
> 
> 
> I agree with you the governance model needs work.  You've called out 
> Karsten a couple of times but it's not clear to me what his role is 
> going to be for CentOS Stream going forward.  That is to say, there are 
> others also involved in CentOS so you may not want to single him out.
> 
> There are a few boundaries I know Red Hat would like to keep in place.
> 
> 1) The mainline branch *is* RHEL and so anything that gets committed 
> there must be merged by a Red Hatter.
> 
> 2) No attempting to do another downstream rebuild (for those that 
> desperately want to contribute to this, there are already other 
> communities for it and we won't be competing with them)
> 
> 3) We want a robust SIG community, and that includes welcoming things 
> that Red Hat isn't particularly interested in.  So when we say no to 
> something in the mainline branch, SIGs should be a fairly safe place to 
> do that where they can use official build infrastructure and 
> distribution mirrors.  I've heard many people talk about special kernel 
> needs, enabling older hardware, kabi, etc.  I'd love to see that done in 
> a SIG.  I also personally think the bar for starting a SIG should be low.

An interesting question here. CentOS Linux was free to use. Can you 
explicitly tell whether these SIGs should be related to paid-only 
services of RH?

Or perhaps I can't see how that can be possible with CentOS Stream.

> I'm not in the governance game here but the question for you, and 
> others, is this - What sort of governance model can we put in place to 
> accomplish these goals as well as whatever common goals we have going 
> forward?  What are our common goals from here?  I've seen many technical
 
> issues brought up on the list over the last two weeks that seem solvable 
> to me.

I am sure there will be answers.

But, as far as I see, these questions should have been asked *before* 
the decision to bury CentOS Linux alive was taken and announced.

(so much for openness and good communication, eh?)

-- 
Sincerely,

Konstantin Boyandin
system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. - IPHost Network Monitor)