[CentOS] CentOS roadmap/EPEL

Wed Jun 25 11:25:38 UTC 2008
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

admin wrote:
> I'm thinking of projects that equip RH-like EL in general for serious
> entry into the enterprise, things like the Fedora Directory Server, and
> RedHat's Emerging Technologies projects such as Cobbler, FreeIPA and
> Ovirt. Also JBoss middleware.

A lot ( if not all ) of these are going to be in CentOS soon, in a lot 
of cases we hope they are better integrated into the CentOS ecosystem 
being in the CentOS Repo's - eg the CentOS DirServer has been in the 
testing repo for a bit, and the same with 
cobbler/koan/func/smolt/maatkit etc.

What we are ( inside the CentOS Team ) hoping to achieve is a good mix 
of people contributing to both the Enterprise Users ( and they are such 
users themselves ) and to specific industry segments where CentOS has 
been popular ( eg. the Virt SIG ).

And since its CentOS, we focus on the Enterprise Stream of products as 
much as possible, and even go directly upstream in cases where we need 
to ( eg. Mysql in CentOS4/5 is the Enterprise Release from mysql, not 
the community release that Fedora and RHEL build with ). That then opens 
more doors for support options for people who use these builds and we 
hope improves and creates options for people who self-support.

And we do consider the self-support users to be the core of what is 
CentOS today and the community around it- like this mailing list, the 
forums, the irc regulars etc.

If you truly look at the entire setup ( eg. the php5.2 conversation 
recently, the fact that CentOS DirServer is around, that an IcedTea 
varient has been in CentOS already - the availability of DRBD for years 
out of the stock repo's ), its quite a well formed out ecosystem ( in 
your words), and one that we would like to promote and build further. 
When I say 'we', I hope to include all the users and abusers of CentOS 
:D - Maybe some of them will agree!

- KB