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

Sat Jan 11 22:17:24 UTC 2020
Brian Stinson <brian at bstinson.com>

On Sat, Jan 11, 2020, at 15:57, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 1/11/20 1:12 PM, Brian Stinson wrote:
> > I think the pattern is different with CentOS Linux though. There isn't really much 'contribution' to be done because the idea is to match what comes from RHEL sources as closely as possible. We don't have individual package maintainers in CentOS because 99% of the time we can get builds through
> 
> 
> I think the frustrating thing about CentOS is that when users ask why 
> delays are so long, the maintainers say "producing CentOS is't just a 
> matter of rebuilding Red Hat sources" and when users ask why there isn't 
> a process to contribute the maintainers say "we're just rebuilding Red 
> Hat sources, and we don't need help with that."
> 
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I guess that's sort of the point that I'm trying to make. Dealing with buildorder, dealing with changes between when Red Hat built a package and when they release a package, and trying to match content up 1:1 in the repos are what takes the most time. And those aren't things that fit with the package-maintainer model. Those activities happen precisely because we try to match sources as closely as possible, but it's also why we say that it's not *just* building all of the packages and blindly shipping whatever comes out of the buildsystem.