[CentOS-devel] A Big Idea for a New Decade [was: Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors 2019-12-18 Meeting]

Sat Jan 11 20:24:02 UTC 2020
Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com>

On 1/10/20 7:19 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> Well sure .. but that is also true for any Linux distribution.  It's not
> like Ubuntu or Debian or Linux Mint (or anyone else) let community
> members build their distributions.


Debian and Fedora are exactly the kind of community-driven projects that 
I think CentOS should be, but isn't.  They have documented processes for 
becoming a maintainer.  Their package management is publicly available, 
so their current status and activity level are clearly visible.  Anyone 
can fork a package, build and test their changes, and send suggested 
changes back in the form of a pull request in order to contribute to an 
existing maintainer without requiring access to build and publish their 
changes to end users.

CentOS does not have an onboarding process that I'm aware of, and does 
not appear to believe it needs one.  There is a "git.centos.org" system, 
but all of the repos I looked at are empty (It's possible that's because 
I'm not logged in.  Logging in currently results in a fatal error.  
Either way, it's disappointing).  Koji is apparently gated to Red Hat QA 
only, so there's no opportunity or mechanism to collaborate until very 
late in the process.

Point being: I agree with the people in this thread who think it would 
be premature to discontinue Fedora Server, until CentOS becomes a mature 
community project.


> We are never going to allow other people to build things not in our
> validated systems and then sign and release it with CentOS Keys as
> CentOS Linux.  That would be ridiculously stupid  :)


Of course it would.  I'm bewildered as to why you're even arguing that 
point.  It's possible that you think we are ridiculously stupid.  It's 
possible that you're arguing in bad faith.  It's possible that you're 
unfamiliar with the collaboration processes common across the entire 
Free Software community.  None of those would be to your credit, so I'd 
love to hear another explanation.