On 04/10/2011 07:36 AM, Ian Murray wrote: > > >> >> The goal of the centos project is to produce an RPM that is exactly like >> the upstream RPM in every way that is legally possible. >> >> The checks we do look at libraries that binaries link to, size of the >> packages and a list of the files the RPM installs. >> >> We would like for all RPMS to be 100%, some (like the example above) are >> not able to be linked against the same environment. >> >> Upstream sometimes uses non released gcc's for compiling or they >> sometimes build with non-released kernels or non released glibc's etc. >> In those cases, we will do the best we can. >> >> We do check these issues as part of the QA process and we do address >> each one that we can. > > Thanks for the response. Sounds like you go to significant lengths. > > Imagine if you were to take any GPL source code for which you don't own > copyright and modify it such that that it would only be compile-able using your > highly modified secret compiler. If you then distributed the executable and the > useless source without the secret compiler, are we suggesting that is allowable > under the GPL? A bit of googling suggests it is. :( > > While this is an extreme example, it kinda sounds like what you suggest RH do. > Well, I do not think they do it on purpose. They have a repository that they point at to build packages. It contains all the latest released packages. This build system will likely also have a "Staged" feature, so that as they build packages, new packages will use the previously compiled (and yet unreleased) packages to build on. If they are building updates and they, for example, build 2 versions of GCC in this process. Then maybe they only release to the public the 2nd version of GCC which they built. So, some of their packages (the ones between the time the first gcc was compiled and the 2nd gcc was compiled) would be build using a non released gcc. The "real world impact" of this is probably zero ... except that things that this (in /var/log/messages) will be different: Linux version 2.6.18-238.1.1.el5 (gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48)) #1 SMP Wed Jan 26 08:03:38 PST 2011 (If that version of GCC was the first one compiled in my example above, CentOS will not have it, but it is used to compile an upstream kernel ... note, this example is not a real case issue, just hypothetical to show how it happens) It could introduce some incompatibility (they changed the package for some reason) ... which is why we try to minimize it, but generally the difference is only cosmetic. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 253 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20110410/f395d2c7/attachment-0005.sig>