[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

Tue Apr 12 21:44:20 UTC 2011
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 12/04/11 17:04, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi Ned,
>
> On 04/11/2011 10:02 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> He's not completely wrong; getting dep ordering with missing
> intermediaries isn't trivial. If upstream takes upto 50 days from
> release to drop a srpm, we need to consider implications in both
> directions right ? and at that point ( it has happened ) we might be
> looking at rebuilds from 50+X days. Where X might even be 20 - 45 days

Fair point :-)

> itself. in 5.3's release time we had to traceback to a fastrack built
> package from 5.1's days.
>

Well, I've said it before - if you built the FasTrack packages as they 
are released upstream then you wouldn't need to track back months trying 
to build it out of sequence. The same thing happened this time around 
too with a kde update I believe. Even if you don't release those 
FasTrack packages, if you at least build them during the life of 5.6 for 
example, when 5.7 gets released you'll have 10, 20, 50 or however many 
packages pre-built, tested and ready to ship and not have to maybe go 
back in time recreating build roots to build them. Generally it's just 
so much easier to build stuff in sequence as it's released by upstream 
rather than trying to rebuild it out of sequence 6 months after the event.