[CentOS] OT: RHEL 6.1 is out

Mon May 23 02:14:52 UTC 2011
R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>

On Sun, 22 May 2011, Steven Crothers wrote:

> I think you're missing the point, if you read between the lines, the
> complaint I see is that CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System)
> is not community based whatsoever.

I don't mind-read as to what a third party meant so well as 
you, it seems

My intent with cAos (post fedora.us), and with CentOS was to 
keep available for the FOSS development community at large, 
the fruit of the distribution integration represented in the 
'testers-list' non-public beta group for the former RHL, and 
the years of work represented there, by people both outside 
and inside Red Hat.  It initially appeared that there would 
not be a binary form integrated distribution in RPM packaged 
form.  Greg of cAos indeed re-worked a fairly initial 
installer called 'cinch'

It was not at all clear that Red Hat would not threaten 
litigation to close such efforts down. They had made such 
threats previously to one of the other co-founders of the 
CentOS sub-project of cAos, as to a RHL rebuild and respin he 
had marketed

To suggest that CentOS is 'not community based whatsoever' 
will come as a great surprise to the donors of bug triage 
effort, of mirroring effort, of wiki authoring, of forum 
participation, of live-CD 'mixing', and so forth

But as hughesjr mentioned just last week, letting random 
people (seemingly a 'community of random and untrusted 
persons') feed content that would end up signed in the CentOS 
project's name, is simply not going to happen.  CentOS has 
never been about that

A 'vetting' and reputation system was proposed in some early 
design documents for fedora.us, but that project lacked the 
mass to make it work; cAos tried a variation of this, and 
encountered a problem with its v.2 when a novice packager 
inadvertently introduced a 'one way' library version bump, 
impairing the maintainability of that release going forward; 
The ATrpms v. DAG archive approach on pushing new versions of 
certain core packages shows two approaches, and the DAG 
non-invasive approach is clearly the mind-share winner -- 
We've [the third-party packaging community] (at least, I've 
been in projects that have) tried variants of 'anyone's code 
is welcome' distribution adjunct preparation before, and it 
does not work well

CentOS binaries creation process is by and large is a very 
literal and non-creative effort

If people want to start their own rebuild efforts, peace be 
with them, and good luck.  But fostering spin-off's is not 
what CentOS is about -- and people railing to the heavens 
about how unfair it is that THEIR false expectations (based on 
some amorphous vision of how great something COULD be, if only 
... ) are not met by the CentOS core team, are simply making 
noise here

-- Russ herrold