[CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag

[Bogdan Nicolescu]

----- Original Message ----
> From: R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org>
> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 3, 2009 6:18:15 PM
> Subject: [CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag
> 
> 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
> 

No Russ, not in this case.  The official answer, a few days ago, took exactly one word line, and one more line (2 answers).

> 
> 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)
> 

I agree with you 100%, I understand the goal of Centos, and I use Centos because of exactly that goal of trying to be 100% RH compatible.  And to take it a step further, I do relate (RH and 100% RH compatibility) with stability, stability which I rather have even at the expense of having to put up with 3 year old versions of applications such as php and others.

BUT... when someone from the Centos team makes a statement like "...latest release has many up-to-date desktop packages..."  or any other statement that might imply, suggest, hint, or even smell of breaking compatibility with RH, for whatever reason, I think a lot of users will start looking for alternatives.

Again, if your goal is to be 100% compatible with RH, then RH dictates the package version.  And just in case some people are not very clear on RH's goals for the foreseeable future:

"It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no
plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market
in the foreseeable future."

http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-hat-desktop-systems-an-update/

This does not mean that other/extra repositories can't and don't exist, but it should always be made crystal clear (and it has been a few days ago), that the base is never compromised.


bn