[CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag
R P Herrold
herrold at centos.org
Fri Jul 3 22:18:15 UTC 2009
On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
> In all fairness to all the rebels, if somebody from the
> Cento's team would have responded in a timely matter to the
> original yes/no question of this thread,
... and an allegedly 'yes or no' question can take three and a
half 24 line screens to set forth? The world is not so
simple
The CentOS project team strives to issue a product and update
stream that replicates, substantially exactly, warts and all,
its upstream from freely available sources, to yield binaries
which are ABI indistinguishable, with a couple of exceptions.
These relate to eliding trademarked matter and replacing it
with CentOS trademarked and copyrighted art; and providing a
suitable updater mechanism (as the sources for the server side
of 'up2date' are not FOSS and have not been released -- at all
when the project started, and still not in full even to the
present day)
The 'base product' variant that does this is the 'base' and
'updates' archives. The end user of CentOS may choose to add
other archives (with varying results), either officially from
CentOS mirrors [plus, testing, and adjuncts for various
upstream products not in mainline]; from individual archives
published by present or former CentOS team members [KB's, DAG,
then RPMforge, elRepo]; or from non-affiliated persons [Atomic
Rocket Turtle, EPEL]
Customized 'one disk' installers, or live CD's have been tried
by the project from time to time; ditto testing extensions to
architectures not supported upstream (and frankly, probably
lacking sufficient mass to be viable [I am in process on a
local 5.3 s390x port, in my idle moments, for relaxation])
The membership of the CentOS team has waxed and waned over
time. The project is a confluence of a sub-project under the
cAos project, some participants in a 'Enterprise Linux
Rebuild' mailing list, and other standalone projects. New
project team members are added by invitation and largely
represent a meritocracy, run in a self-perpetuating fashion.
CentOS is not Fedora, OpenSuSE, or any other distribution, and
is not 'beholden' to any outside organization
The heart and core of the distribution is those (very few core
team) members able to cause the relevant CentOS private key to
'sign' binary RPH packages; scarcely less important is the
mirror distribution network, and the seamless coverage and
scaling which we have been able to achive with the help of the
mirror members. I stop here, as the contributions are too
numerous to mention
Demonstrating competence in the support functions is readily
approachable, and a good way to 'join' the work of the project
-- IRC, forums, wiki, mailing lists -- and as I mentioned in a
earlier post to this list, noticed and noted as to character
and quality. People adding value are often offered a change
to undertake increasingly more critical contributions to the
project
-- Russ herrold
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