On 4/7/2011 10:23 AM, Brunner, Brian T. wrote:
>
>>> While SL and other distributions are perfectly fine for almost all
>>> uses, there's a certain irony in the fact the single advantage of
>>> CentOS is the ease of converting from it to a paid/supported RHEL
>>> installation, and the RH changes that make the rebuild difficult are
>>> driving people away.
>>
>> This sounds as if RH is responsible for not yet released CentOS 6 ?
>> What did I miss ? What changes do you talking about ?
>
> AIUI: In previous releases, RH distributed source + patches. Starting
> 6.0 RH releases patched source. This makes backing out a patch, or
> backporting patches from future development in Fedora (e.g.) far more
> nightmarish than before.
This one shouldn't affect the stock CentOS kernel and the 6.x release
shouldn't have to wait for the centosplus version.
> Also AIUI, it appears the (undisclosed) RH build environment changed
> significantly, such that generating bit-for-bit identical binaries (a
> CentOS objective) requires mind-reading RH folks by CentOS folks (aka
> reverse-engineering the undisclosed RH build environment).
Yes, if you can't build from the source and libs shipped, it is a
problem... And from the meager info disclosed by the CentOS devs so far
there's not much reason to be optimistic about how long it will take
them to be able to reproduce the missing build environment tools/libs or
if that will ever be possible. And there's no particular reason to
expect this to get better going forward with security-related updates
since RH apparently wants to put the alternatives at a disadvantage.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com