[CentOS] How can a company help, officially?

Tue Apr 12 11:56:54 UTC 2011
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 04/11/2011 05:07 PM, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 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.
> 

I did not do anything to discredit anyone and I take exception to that term.

I published an example of WHY CentOS does not release anything until we
check it via QA.  Once something is released, it can not "come back".

What I said was what CentOS does if we have a problem (look at other
distros to see if they have the same problem).

I did not say that SL does not care about compatibility, nor did I make
any claims that CentOS was more or less compatible than SL.  If users
what to find out the answer to that, then they can take the time to run
the tests.

SL is a great product.  If I did not use CentOS, I would use it.

However, CentOS is locked in a battle with Debian as the "Leader of
Webservers" on the top 1 million websites for the world. 29% of the
Linux websites in the world use CentOS:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux

CentOS has been the "Market Leader" for web server installs on the top 1
million websites for the last year.

You can like it CentOS or dislike it, however the numbers do not lie.

We will, therefore, release our products after we QA test them as we
have to maintain the quality that people have come to expect.

And I have known that all of YOUR concern about the process has always
been so you can try to steal our users Dag.  If you want to steal our
users for your rebuild then you can do that.

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