[CentOS] Re: BETA 2

Thu Feb 22 15:15:49 UTC 2007
Connie Sieh <csieh at fnal.gov>

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Johnny Hughes wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 21:22 -0500, Tom Diehl wrote:
>> Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 10:21 -0500, Jerry Geis wrote:
>>>> So is beta 2 off - in favor of just waiting for the real RHEL5 release?
>>>> RH has said it is ready to go and would be released in march. Hopefully
>>>> march 1. HA!
>>>>
>>>
>>> More like March 15th (and don't hold your breath :P)
>>>
>>> We will release a beta ... as we are close now at fixing everything.
>>
>> Just out of couriosity, would you be willing to comment on the issues the CentOS
>> team is running up against. Given upstream's decision to scrap the old way
>> of spinning and distributing the distro I would imagine some of them are large
>> problems.
>
> Well ... the majority of our problems are coming from the fact that
> upstream did not build everything on the same builder.  They
> grabbed .fc6 stuff as is and used it (not necessarily compiled on their
> el5 builder).
>
> Many items are compiled against different kernel-headers, etc.
>
> Because of that, we needed to fix a bunch of stuff that we normally
> don't need to.
>
> Also, the  whole Registration thing (you need this number to use the
> Server repo and that number to install VT, etc.) we are by passing, as
> well as removing all the RHN bits.
>
> Scientific Linux took a different approach (they released several of the
> upstream files that do not build on el5 ... and I think they build the

I am hoping that they will be fixed in the final release.  Did not want to 
have to fix things twice.

> fc6 files on fc6).  We did not want that approach, as one of our goals

Everything we built was built on RHEL 5 beta 2.  Mostly in a mock chroot. 
If it did not build and it was easy for me to fix I just fixed it 
otherwise I borrowed the rpm from RHEL 5 beta 2.  RHEL 5 beta 2 contained 
alot of .fc6 rpms, but the SRPMS provided had .el5 rpms.  So I just put in 
the .el5 rpms as that was what was provided.

I just wanted to get something out and to get a head start are building SL 
5.x ,  did not expect the "Very Alpha" of BETA2 to be a finished product.
Guess I was going for the "release early" part of open source.

> is that the repo is self-hosting was well (meaning that it will
> completely build on itself).  Not that the Scientific Linux approach is
> wrong, we thought about doing it that way too.  But in the end, we
> wanted it self hosting and all built on el5.
>

We expect self hosting too.

> Thanks,
> Johnny Hughes
>
>
>

-Connie Sieh
Scientific Linux Developer