[CentOS] new list proposal

[Les Mikesell]

Stephen Harris wrote:
> 
> To be honest, I don't think this list should be split.  Instead it
> should be more rigorously policed. 

I have to disagree strongly with that, since policing generally wastes 
everyone's time with more noise that it manages to control and there 
will (and should) always be an influx of new users who won't understand 
arcane rules.

> This should be a list about CentOS,
> and working with CentOS.
> 
> Generic SA type stuff (how do you do "this generic task" in script) should
> not be present here; there's already enough SA type lists out there.

But the way you administer Centos or any RH-like system is very much 
different than the way you administer other systems.  Anything that 
involves yum, rpm, chkconfig, system, system-config-*, or the various 
bits squirreled away under /etc/sysconfig are pretty system-specific and 
if the right answer involves them (as most SA tasks do) you'll get the 
wrong answer on a generic SA list.  There's also the problem that if you 
mention the application versions you are running on Centos, the answer 
in any other forum will be "update to current..." which only rarely is 
the right thing to do.

> Similarly, Apache configuration shouldn't be here... although interaction
> between Apache and SELinux probably _should_.

Or the bits that various system-specific packages splat into 
/etc/httpd/conf.d.

> CentOS specific questions
> should be particularly welcome (which would, therefore, also include
> discussion of "features" from upstream).
> 
> I guess a rule of thumb could be "if the question and answer is materially
> unchanged if the OS is CentOS or Debian or Solaris or *BSD then it
> doesn't belong here."

If you have to ask a question, there is almost no chance that you will 
know if that is true about the answer or not.  But even if you did, the 
missing piece is something that covers best practices or how to do 
things on Red Hat-like systems.  There's not much that is really 
Centos-specific but a lot that applies across fedora, RH, and its rebuilds.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com