[CentOS] Open Letter to Lance Davis

Marcelo M. Garcia wrote:
> Connie Sieh wrote:
>>> Ralph Angenendt wrote:
>>>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>>>> Has anyone considered joining forces with Scientific Linux to reduce the
>>>>>   workload and give both a more robust infrastructure?
>>>> Yes, but the goals are rather different.
>>> I thought both had upstream compatibility as the main goal - and both
>>> seem competent enough that I wouldn't expect many problems in this
>>> regard.  SL also claims a secondary goal of making site customization
>>> easy - perhaps Centos as we know it could simply be one of those
>>> customizations and going forward other variations would be easy.  If the
>>> people doing the work aren't getting any value out of the brand name, I
>>> don't see the point of fragmenting the user community for what is
>>> essentially the same thing.
>> I was expecting it to be the other way around.  With Centos the base and 
>> SL a site(or something like it). In RHEL 6 I expect the distro rebuild tools to make sites easier.  This 
>> comment is based on the distro rebuild tools in Fedora.  We built a custom 
>> Fedora 10 to test this idea.  These are pungi, revisor and the iso image 
>> tool(forgot its name).
> 
> CentOS and Scientific Linux together would be like dream come true.

My 'dream' OS has always been one where the base install was extremely 
minimal - just enough to install the rest over the network.  Then there 
would be a way that anyone could 'publish' their installed list of 
repositories and packages and anyone else could duplicate that machine's 
setup just by picking that list from a set of choices with the installer 
dealing with the hardware differences for you.  This would eliminate 
most of the need for custom rebuilds and respins - at least for anyone 
with network access, and in my opinion the optimal combination of many 
thousands of packages is something that deserves to be be crowdsourced. 
  But, so far no one has done it and whenever the discussion of modified 
CentOS respins comes up the developers have seemed pretty lukewarm to 
the idea, as though it would devalue their brand.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com