[CentOS] Effecting CentOS change

On 7/13/2011 3:17 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> CentOS has a clear mission. It's the first paragraph on the centos.org
> home page:
>
>     CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from
>     sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American
>     Enterprise Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream
>     vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible.
>     (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding
>     and artwork.)  CentOS is free.
>
> Discussions about the packages and utilities that are or aren't
> included in CentOS (the recent discussion of system-config-bind comes
> to mind, but it's not the only example) should re-read the CentOS
> mission.

Agreed that this isn't something related to centos-dev or packaging. 
But in many/most cases the discussions of that ilk are about things that 
most centos users have to deal with.

> Anyone wanting change in that regard should, imo, purchase a license
> from the prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor and provide
> feedback as a paying customer. Said vendor may or may not heed those
> suggestions, but that is the only effective way to change the CentOS
> utility/package list.
>
> Honestly, we could all -- every single last one of us -- agree that
> $PACKAGE belongs in the core CentOS distribution, but until
> $LARGE_VENDOR agrees, we're just shouting in a vacuum.

I think most such discussions would end happily if someone mentions a 
suitable $PACKAGE name in EPEL or the non-base-overwriting section of 
rpmforge. Everything we use doesn't have to be included in the base 
distribution but if it isn't, people might need help in choosing/finding 
the appropriate $PACKAGE or learning that one doesn't exist.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com