[CentOS] the ongoing wait for centos 5.4

Sun Oct 18 07:54:18 UTC 2009
Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>

  at the risk of picking at that scab a bit longer, i'm going to toss
out a comment regarding people still waiting for the public
availability of centos 5.4.

  here:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-October/083743.html

we read:

"The last status (from twitter) is 2 days old with the '5.4 is baked!
centos internal network will start syncing up today. Release ~ soon!'.
Any ETA?"

followed by the response:

"Just relax and wait, this is a _volunteer_ based project. Want a
release date? Go pay for RHEL."

  not to put too find a point on it, but that reply is more than a bit
dickish.  it doesn't *matter* if it's a volunteer project.  as i see
this, this is turning into an issue of credibility.

  once someone posts that the 5.4 release is allegedly "baked" and
syncing is beginning, then it's not unreasonable that people will
start getting anxious to see it hit the mirrors.  and as the days go
by, it's not unreasonable for those people to start wondering what the
heck is going on.

  again, whether people are being paid to do any of this work is not
relevant.  it's important, from the perspective of reputation, that
everyone see the centos project as being efficiently and competently
run, and making what *appears* to be an announcement of completion and
the beginning of syncing servers, followed by days of awkward silence
and increasingly defensive rhetoric, is not the way to do it.  it just
looks bad.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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