[CentOS-docs] Building yet another an off round wheel; was: Contribution to wiki: nagios incompatibility with centos 5.2

Thu Sep 17 14:26:48 UTC 2009
R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org>

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Christoph Maser wrote:

> So we should make a proper nagios documentation on the 
> centos-wiki because the official nagios docs suck?

I've said it before, and thought I was a voice crying alone in 
the wilderness -- welcome, Christoph ;)

> herrold prior: 
> WHY are we building maintenance load? What is wrong with the
> virtualization documentation we already ship?  I know I file
> bugs upstream on xen and libvirt, but no one participating 
> on this thread here has so far as I can see;  if there is a
> problem of lack of clarity, the answer is NOT to write yet
> more non-authoritative doco first
 	http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/2009-April/002623.html

We were down this same path as to virtualization months ago, 
and by coincidence my script wrapping virt-install was 
mentioned in an IRC channel just yesterday

later:

> herrold prior:
> I remain unconvinced that replicating documentation, and
> adding places for entropy to rot in a wiki is a win.  I'd
> upstream the change, instead, as there is NO CentOS specific
> aspect here.
 	http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/2009-April/002799.html

> herrold prior:
> I have no such goal to court public opinion, and I think 
> neither does the core value of the project;  that people 
> feel a need to use CentOS as a locus to contribute is a 
> matter beyond the core scope mandate of a strict rebuild 
> project

> The CentOS core mandate, to me, is to elide trademarks from 
> an upstream FOSS sources rebuild; solving the issue of the 
> non-free updater solution upstream; and preserving 
> (lovingly) all bugs to match upstream.

> I see NO shame in being called knock-off _out of_ a 
> commercial product, any more than Red Hat should feel shame 
> in stabilising the enormous effort of the free software 
> community that preceded them (and that continues independent 
> of, or in conjunction with them) _into_ a commercial 
> product.  This is the point of FOSS [ESR, and the 'chasing 
> the tail-lights' example].
 	http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/2009-April/002807.html

New editorial matter resumes:

If people want to write content, they NEED TO GO TO FEDORA, or 
the upstream, and get patches accepted, so the changes flow 
back down in our future.  Go work at the trailhead, not in an 
upstream project's past (here Nagios).

We at CentOS are an enterprise rebuild as the core product. 
Nothing more.  That is OUR trailhead

Tasks in doco, sub-projects, and the like that take away from 
building, testing and pushing the SRPMs into binary RPMs at 
point update time; [to permit us to end the 'updates blackout' 
window and resume] the security updates; and the (rare) 
difficult stablization of new ISOs at major release when 
anaconda has traditionally made major delta, should properly 
come later, if at all

Support for CentOS specific variations is fair game.  But most 
of the wiki and the forums as I scan it simply repeat existing 
content with GENERAL usage information; In part that why I am 
so ready to be scornful of IRC 'spoonfeeders', and to try to 
keep #centos an on topic teaching channel, rather than a 'drop 
in answer takeaway' store.

Building yet more 'stuff' down paths with no future and in the 
past only provides food for entropy to eat away at; it imposes 
load to no meaningful gain.

My $0.02

-- Russ herrold