[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

Mon Apr 11 22:07:37 UTC 2011
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On 4/11/2011 4:02 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
>> On 11/04/11 20:16, Digimer wrote:
>>>
>>> /putting on asbestos pants.
>>>
>>> each release is more complex than the last. The web of dependency grows,
>>> so the reverse-engineering takes longer and longer.
>>>
>>
>> This is just complete nonsense. You clearly have no understanding of the
>> processes involved in rebuilding RHEL. CentOS doesn't reverse-engineer
>> anything, they simply rebuild the upstream sources. It's not rocket science.
>
> It's not simple... They don't ship until they reproduce something that
> they consider 'binary compatible' to the upstream binaries, which
> depends on a build environment containing some things that don't match
> the sources.  Some of this is documented for the similar SL build but
> they aren't as picky about library linkage versions (which may not
> matter functionally anyway).

Les,

It's unfair to Scientific Linux to imply that Scientific Linux does not 
care about compatibility. The issues reported on this list by Johnny to 
discredit SL were found in the 5.6 alpha release, already fixed by SL and 
improperly used to discredit SL.

Johnny found those packages when comparing his own build-issues against 
Scientific's Linux release, while the Scientific Linux project has no such 
means to do the same because CentOS does not provide public alpha and beta 
releases.

It's one thing to find an issue in a competing product, but it's another 
to bring it up on this mailinglist to discredit a competing product 
(just because it is truly open and has a public alpha release).

CentOS obviously looks at how Scientific Linux is fixing issues, but 
keeping their own fixes secret.

PS The notion that Scientific Linux does not care about compatbility is a 
false claim and it needs to stop.

-- 
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, info at dagit.net, http://dagit.net/

[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]