On Monday, December 28, 2020 7:14 AM, Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at centosproject.org> wrote: > On 12/28/20 1:30 PM, redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel wrote: > > > In my experience, the prep section of building a kernel always amounts to less than 1% of the overall build time. There is no time savings by pre-applying the patches that justifies the lack of time savings. > > This started with RHEL 6, and the likely motivation was to hinder Oracle > Enterprise Linux, not to save build time.[1] According to Wikipedia, > Oracle even provides a service breaking down Red Hat's huge diff from > upstream into individual patches, not sure how effective the Red Hat > approach is, if the goal is indeed to stop OEL.[2, last paragraph] > > [1] > http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds-Red-Hat-s-obfuscated-source-code-release-1200554.html > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Rebuilds I understand the history of the of obfuscation. But keep in mind that RHEL 6 goes back to 2010 long before CentOS joining Red Hat. We accepted some limitations of being a downstream clone. That having CentOS completely separate from Red Hat is going to have specific realities that come with it. One of those realities is the upstream sets the policy. That the openness gap created by those upstream policies were out of scope for CentOS. Things are very different to have a governance meeting which had Chris Wright, Brain Exelbierd, Rich Bowen and Carl Trieloff. Are these considered to be active members of the CentOS community or mostly employees expected to make Red Hat's interests a priority? With those type of people at the meeting, they should have been able to make deobfuscating the patches part of balancing CentOS' needs when being switched to being the upstream provider. Clearly balancing the needs of CentOS and closing the openness gap was not priorities of that meeting. Despite that, Karsten Wade still felt it completely appropriate to post a blog post about this closing the openness gap. The contradictions don't stop there. We have had Red Hat employees asking us if we would be interested in taking part in an OpenStack SIG. Red Hat being interested in there being such a CentOS SIG would be consistent with them having put Rich Bowen on the governance board. But then we have Mike McGrath explain Red Hat is not striving for CentOS to be enterprise grade and it is a mistake for anyone to think otherwise. I have been involved in the OpenStack community but there is no way I want to be involved in an OpenStack SIG for CentOS now. There is no such thing as a personal-edition of OpenStack. There is a no point in having an OpenStack SIG for a CentOS which should never be mistaken for being enterprise grade. None of this balancing the needs of CentOS. We get the downsides of being an upstream and not the upsides of having an the openness gap fixed for the kernel SRPM. We get the downside of being asked to put in the work for an OpenStack SIG but also told not to expect things to be enterprise grade. The biopolar nature of the direction we should expect of Stream is just making my head spin.