[CentOS-devel] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

Fri Dec 11 15:55:22 UTC 2020
Michael Scherer <mscherer at redhat.com>

Le jeudi 10 décembre 2020 à 12:39 +0000, Dan Seguin a écrit :
> Who exactly do you expect will contribute to RHEL from the CENTOS
> community? 
> 
> Why would *anybody* spend their own time, even their IT reputations
> rolling any of this mess? 

I would, even if I wasn't paid by RH.

My job involve being a sysadmin, and so I run Centos servers in
production, along some Fedora, some Debian and others, for myself and
for work.

Each time I want to get a small new feature or fixes, not being able to
easily contribute to RHEL (and so Centos) despites working at RH is a
problem. 

I have a few examples:
a few years ago, I bought a Yubikey for myself. I want to use it on my
RHEL 7 (my laptop) as a smartcard, but it was not supported. 

I searched, found the fix is 2 lines in the usb-ids database. I opened
a bug in may 2016, I provided the patch, went to complain on internal
IRC to the right people, who escalated that in meeting, and it still
took ~6 months:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157226

I knew what to do, because I had the same problem in 2014:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157226 where it took 1
year to get the fix in RHEL 7 (and so Centos 7).

On Fedora (or others faster distros) where there is a documented way to
contribute, I would have waited a few weeks at best, maybe more in
worst case (depending how persistant I am into getting a fix). With
streams, I hope that at least, I wouldn't need to wait on "next minor
release", given the delay it had. 

And keep in mind that while I did that using my profesionnal
relationship, I did it for myself, and others Centos users did benefit
from it.


Another example, SELinux. When I see a unconfined service (last one,
knot, for my personal DNS server, but also synapse or gitea, personal
matrix and personal forge), I try to write a policy, and while on it,
get it usable for others. Usually, I have not much trouble to get
things in the Fedora package. 

I have no hope to get it backported to RHEL (and so Centos), but at
least, with Stream, I would have a path to try to get it done. 

Again, I would write the policy for me anyway, so why shouldn't I try
to share it with others ?
 

And I do not think I am the only one with a ethos of sharing bugfixes
with the rest of the community. The whole free software movement is
built on that.
-- 
Michael Scherer / He/Il/Er/Él
Sysadmin, Community Infrastructure



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