[CentOS] What happened to 6.1

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday, November 01, 2011 11:24:24 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
> If, in fact, you cannot rebuild a src rpm and get a working
> copy then in that respect you might as well be using closed,
> proprietary software.

"Working" and "binary compatible" are two different things, and typically the 100% binary compatibility is most important for precompiled things and for closed source things.

In the SOgo case, a recompile on the target box fixed the issue and resulted in a 'working' binary.  But it very possibly would not be 100% compatible with the same exact binary built from the same source code on a slightly different base.

Preventing 100% binary compatible builds and testing is a shot clean across the bow of upstream's two biggest Enterprise Linux competitors, but the CentOS boat got caught in the crossfire.

Nothing in the GPL requires building any particular binary (in terms of compatibility), it just requires access tot he source and the build tools.  Well, the build tools are completely free (Koji), it's just the exact set of binaries (for that matter, metadata about those binaries) that is not available for each package.

SL is in fact using the same buildsystem as upstream (Koji) and spent quite a bit of time upfront ramping it up.  SL likely doesn't have any better access to upstream's metadata that is critical for binary compatibility testing either.