[CentOS] how can we help? was: Re: The delays on CentOS 5.6 are causing EPEL incompatibilities

Wed Mar 23 16:58:23 UTC 2011
R P Herrold <herrold at centos.org>

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, cornel panceac wrote:

> 2011/3/23 R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>
>
>>  This comes and goes, and really there is no substitute for actually
>> 'doing' rather than
>> talking in the cloister

> as i see it, the problem is while the users expectation has grown, the work
> became harder.

ehhh?  It has not gotten materially harder to build, if indeed 
it has gotten harder at all.  4.9 sailed out (thanks, Johnny 
-- also there was no new ISO set and anaconda to spin); 5.6 
has some niggles which are being worked out in QA; and my 
trial building of the 6 sources, INCLUDING A RE-WRITE of my 
local autobuilder, took less than a week, for getting the 
first pass done.  I am not happy with the package build 
scheduler (it is too naiive and not as efficient as I would 
like it)

That said, I then rebuilt those sources 3 more rounds, to make 
sure they are self-hosting and stabilized, BEFORE turning to 
address trademark and branding issues.  If a person were 
inclined to see the process and get a flavor for doing rounds 
of rebuilding to ensure convergance, rebuild gcc, or glicb 
from an unpacked tarball, with the minimal shell tools 
building environment for 'bootstrapping' into a new 
environment

> so i believe the real question is: how can we help the 
> CentOS project? how can we unload the developers so that 
> they do more high level and/or creative things with less 
> work?

I am substantially certain the archive of this list or the 
-devel list contains suggesting identifying trade-marks that 
leaked out of 'redhat-logos', and branding changes not 
affirmatively required by the 'elide other's trademarks' 
requirement; large numbers of bugs are never touched and 
confirmed as reproduceable, or still viable; pushing fixes 
upstream [we had an email inquiry today, wanting to help 
extend CentOS to add a new national language that will not 
occur here, but is a perfectly reasonable translation project 
to push into Fedora so it eventually flows down here ... ]

It is perfectly reasonable to 'toil in the vinyards' of Fedora 
to cause future CentOS versions to benefit from the effort

-- Russ herrold