[CentOS] 6.2 release: a thank you

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Wed Dec 21 20:11:08 UTC 2011


On 12/21/2011 01:27 PM, Alain Péan wrote:
> Le 21/12/2011 19:49, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn a écrit :
>> On 12/21/2011 07:25 PM, Louis Lagendijk wrote:
>>> Gents
>>> I would like to express my appreciation for the unbelievably quick
>>> release of Centos 6.2. Thanks a million! You managed to release 6.2 some
>>> 10 days after 6.1. Johnny, you are not that ugly after all :-).
>>>
>> I concur and just out of curiosity does anyone have the upstream vs.
>> downstream timing of all previous releases? Could the be the fastest
>> release in the history of Centos so far?
>>
>> Regards,
>>     Dennis
>>
> 
> Hi Dennis,
> 
> See wikipedia :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
> 
> I noticed that the release date of 6.2 was updated on this page at least 
> as fast as 6.2 was released !
> FWIW, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 were released faster, and 4.9 as fast. But I 
> agree, it was a very pleasant surprise to see 6.2 released as fast, 
> after the big delay of 6.0 and 6.1.
> 
> Could the developpers explain what change in the process to achieve such 
> a quick release (after a mail a few weeks ago of Johnny explaining how 
> difficult it was now...) ?
> 

It is still difficult, but all the things that we put into place to
build/test 6.1 were still there for 6.2

All the multilib lists, optional channel lists, etc. still worked for 6.2.

And, unlike the older builds, we did not need to build anything outside
of the CentOS RPMS, etc.

If you take a look here, SL has documented packages that do not build
correctly with only EL6 as the host:

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/build/koji/targets/

If you look here, there are other things that required special building
orders and packages:
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=5180

There was also the fact that several packages did not build correctly
because of a change in the default environment:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743229

Then there were packages that would build with only a specific version
of gcc ... and there are packages that need glibc-static ... and
packages with hidden build requiremnts (see the
"config_opts['more_buildreqs']" stuff here:

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/build/koji/configs/site-defaults.cfg

Those things all needed to be figured out manually, one by one, to get a
good build environment.

Now that we have figured those out, with the build environment set, we
could just build and test packages and release them.

As I said, the hardest part was getting the outliers and the build
system built before ... moving forward it should be much faster now.

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