[CentOS] The delays on CentOS 5.6 are causing EPEL incompatibilities

Wed Mar 23 06:45:46 UTC 2011
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 23/03/11 03:41, John R. Dennison wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 04:22:36AM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote:
>>
>> CentOS 4.8 (95 days late) and CentOS 5.3 (69 days late) have been the worst
>> delays. But now CentOS 5.6 is already at 69 days and CentOS 6.0 is past
>> 133 days delay, an all time record (not counting CentOS 2 :-)).
>
> 	You keep tossing out "late".  "late" implies a published deadline
> 	and I've yet to see one.  I see "best effort" and "will try"
> 	comments in many places, but never a published deadline.  So,
> 	why the focus on "late"?
>
>

I see time-lines clearly published in this FAQ on the CentOS website:

https://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=7

Quote:
"How long after redhat publishes a fix does it take for CentOS to 
publish a fix?

Our goal is to have individual RPM packages available on the mirrors 
within 72 hours of their release, and normally they are available within 
24 hours.

Occassionally packages are delayed for various reasons.

On rare occasions packages may be built and pushed to the mirrors but 
not available via yum. (This is because yum-arch has not been run on the 
master mirror. This may happen when issues with upstream packages are 
discovered shortly after their release, and if releasing the package 
would break it's functionality.)

Update Sets (see this FAQ) will have Security Errata released was stated 
above, while the BugFix and Enhancement errata are actually tested more 
rigorisly and released after the new ISO for the Update Set is produced. 
This will normally be within 2 weeks of the Update Set release."


The above FAQ creates an expectation of 2 weeks being the norm. Equally 
it is not unreasonable to define any release made after two weeks to be 
"late" (or later than hoped if you prefer) by the developers own hopes 
and expectations.