On Wed, 23 Dec 2020 at 15:32, redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel <centos-devel at centos.org> wrote: >> It says CentOS and the RHEL team would have a "firewall" between them. All communication between them would be only via SRPM. Brian "Bex" Exelbierd's inclusion on the board is a clear violation of that. > > Bex's position was to 'replace' Karsten's place on the board whose job was to do the same thing previously. Also your second problem is that all communication between them would only be via SRPM. > 1. git.centos.org was the way EL7 was being used to communicate packages. > 2. communication via git or srpm would have resulted in CentOS EL7 and EL8 never getting released because problems happen. Sometimes the chain of packages being pushed is in the wrong order of a package gets dropped. [This happened in EL4/EL5/EL6 also.. in those days it could be a multiple day/week trip of 'hey do you know who I can get to push foobaz-1.2.3-5? huh my last person is on vacation and won't be back til December.' After the acqui-hiring this was brought down quite a bit because the teams actually could communicate with each other directly. > > So if there was a firewall.. it was full of holes by the time CentOS7 was getting made. I think the issue is that people have all had vastly different running assumptions of how CentOS was run versus how it has been since day one. [Warning flawed analogy ahead.] Everything ran pretty darn smoothly for what people cared so looking too far under the bonnet to see how the engine really worked was out of the question. Then when the car maker says it isn't going to make internal combustion any longer but move towards electric there are large hues and cries from people who think that it will make the car unworkable but couldn't actually have fixed their own cars for 20 years or more. [End flawed analogy] Give an inch, take a mile? It is understandable that problems came up resulting in soft-fails of the firewall. It is one thing for a CentOS member to intitate a request to the RHEL team to address a problem impacting the CentOS community. In the best of all worlds this communication was documented in the open via a public bugzilla issue. You probably will be able to give examples in which the soft-fails was not documented in an open/public way. Maybe it is because Red Hat is unresponsive to issues filed in bugzilla. Having to bypass bugzilla to get things addressed in a more realistic time frame would be another thing Red Hat really should fix as well then. However, I would also be willing to bet that you could give details on why those soft-fails still honored the spirit of the firewall for governance. Taking any member of the RHEL team and putting them in a seat on the CentOS goverance board is a *HARD* fail of the firewall. This is the point in which the letter and spirit of CentOS goverance was shredded and thrown away. Having the RHEL member which decides the RHEL roadmap part of the goverance to remove 8 years of commitment on CentOS 8 is crossing a line which was indicated would never be crossed. When Karsten Wade was notified a member of the RHEL team would be taking his place, he should have felt an obligation to object. Instead he re-affired it with a blog post that it is balancing the needs around CentOS. The primary goal of the head of the RHEL roadmap should be to balance the needs of RHEL. No one should be trying to claim that Bex was beig impartial and giving 100% to his job as well. Put another way, it should be troubling if someone said Doctor Jack Kevorkian was put on a committee to decide organ transplants and some of his own patients would be the donors. And if someone was told a committee that included Kevorkian decided someone should only live 1 more year instead of an expected 8 additional years, it should be understandable why that is upsetting. It is also extremely upsetting Karsten Wade decides to redress this as the best way to address the openness gap. Yes, RHEL's private rawhide created an openness gap. Some of us requested it be public. We were told Fedora's public rawhide was good enough for the majority of users. Much like how Karsten Wade now says this change is good enough for 95% of users. RHEL was able to justify the openness gap. Fixing it should be up to them without CentOS and not used to justify putting Bex on the CentOS governance board. In terms of balancing the needs of the CentOS platform and the openness gap, the CentOS governance board should be focus on if the CentOS Stream kernel SRPM should be of the same quality as Fedora's kernel SRPM. Or if pre-applying patches in a non-open way is acceptable. Bex has a clear conflict of interest in this area. RHEL's roadmap has been that patches remain in a pre-applied tar-ball. Having a board that puts the CentOS community first can not involve him. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/attachments/20201224/057785fe/attachment-0005.html>