[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

[R P Herrold]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On 4/12/2011 12:51 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
>>
>> off the top of my head, here is the meta-code

> Would you really repeat those steps by hand if someone gave 
> you a new server to add to what you use?  Maybe things are 
> worse than I'd guessed.

You did not read the commentary ... much may be automated 
[I've blogged about using lftp to mirror a pile of SRPMs as in 
step 1; published the perl build reading scripts, and the 
chroot building process as long ago as cAos days, and so 
forth], but much of full distribution building is problem 
solving skills and 'one off tasks' that vary over time as the 
SRPMs dictate when one goes to build them

Ther is no substitute for doing it to learn how to do it. 
Speculation from bystanders is not all that helpful; the 
process is understood, so 'helpful' attempts on streamlining 
process are not helpful.  If one wants to help, set up a local 
laboratory and learn how to build --- but this is quite hard, 
and so we've recommend bug triage, test writing and other 
'reputational' building paths into the project ... but people 
would rather troll and trawl in mailing lists.  I've referred 
to 'do-ers' and 'talkers' over the years.  Eventually the 
'do-ers' ignroe 'talkers'

Writing the flowchart got me to thinking about the desire 
someone had for adding 'metering, such as a twitter driven 
'progress bar' --- It will not happen, because one does not 
know what measure of builds represent 'full scale' complete, 
until one is complete, which is too late for a progress bar 
[unless one is 'solving' the rebuild yet again, a useless 
act].  Sadly the effort is not even linear so that one might 
extrapolate a 'close rate' because the 'hard stuff' tends to 
pile up and be solved last

-- Russ herrold