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

Tue Jan 7 20:31:54 UTC 2020
Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at centosproject.org>

On 1/7/20 1:09 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> 3. Today, the CentOS Project is (sadly) a community project in a very
> superficial sense. Aside from the Virt SIG's Xen subgroup, all SIGs
> are basically Red Hat product teams, with varying degrees of
> allowances for community contributions. The community processes within
> CentOS are mostly nonfunctional because they've had no reason to
> develop it.

I think that's true. I'm a non-RH member of the CentOS Cloud Instance 
SIG and I've been developing the CentOS images for Vagrant since the 
beginning of 2016. Having to have the generated images copied to 
cloud.centos.org by a member of the core team and then signed by another 
one (both RH, both very busy) made the entire process slower and more 
frustrating than it needs to be. Things have gotten worse since CentOS 
8, since we lost the ability to build the images in CBS due to the 
builders being EL7. I built the first Vagrant images for 8 locally 
around November 2019 using libvirt and submitted a PR on GitHub. I 
wanted to ask on the list for testers for VirtualBox, HyperV and VMware; 
I think I have around 4 unanswered emails to the core team, and I 
discovered there are centos/8 images available for download, albeit only 
for libvirt and VirtualBox, without any explanation about what's going 
on. It doesn't even make sense to generate new images for 6 or 7 on CBS, 
since I'm not able to upload them myself and my emails go unanswered. 
When I volunteer work and my free time, having to beg people all the 
time and be ignored is not my idea of fun.

Out of curiosity, how is the experience of contributing to Fedora if 
you're not a RH employee, same as here?

Best regards,
Laurențiu