[CentOS] Working with the upstream vendor

[Digimer]

On 07/09/2011 01:32 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> yes, we all clearly take that on board - I hope the changes we are
> bringing in helps clear that, and prevent this sort of a situation. But
> there are still lots of places for improvements, and over the next few
> months lets try and address all of those.
>
> - KB

Sorry for thread-jacking, but I wanted to start this thread in relation 
to your comment.

As I understand it, a lot of the delay came from reproducing Red Hat's 
build environment. That being needed for the binary compatibility. With 
each new major release, the number of packages, and in turn, the amount 
of complexity grows.

Is that a correct understanding? If so, then EL7 will be even harder to 
sort out and will lead to an even longer delay in release.

I think there is a business case to be made for CentOS, from the point 
of view of Red Hat. My experience has been that a lot of 
people/companies start out on CentOS. After a while, those that succeed 
and do well eventually want to switch to Red Hat proper. As good as 
CentOS is, by it's very nature, it will always lag behind RHEL in so far 
as updates are concerned.

Given all this; I think there is an argument for Red Hat wanting to 
assist CentOS. As we saw with this release, the delay drove people away 
from EL. I am sure many went to Debian or other non-EL distributions. 
Each of these defections is another potential future customer lost to 
Red Hat.

If Red Hat could be convinced to help the CentOS team with things like 
setting up their build environment, they would help foster this 
potential customer base while investing minimal time and effort. Has 
anyone in the CentOS team approached Red Hat to discuss some sort of 
arrangement like this?

As an anecdotal example; We've built our entire infrastructure on 
CentOS. Now, our clients who are doing well, we are moving to Red Hat 
proper while still using a lot of CentOS internally and for smaller 
clients. It's a very smooth fit and transition, thanks to CentOS's 
binary compatibility.

Just an idea. Thanks for the hard work and I'm anxious to play with 
CentOS 6!

-- 
Digimer
E-Mail:              digimer at alteeve.com
Freenode handle:     digimer
Papers and Projects: http://alteeve.com
Node Assassin:       http://nodeassassin.org
"I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries."