On 08/04/2015 04:40 PM, Always Learning wrote: > > On Tue, 2015-08-04 at 07:06 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote: > >> CentOS Linux normally also follows the upstream dist tags, except for >> packages where we make changes, where we use .el6.centos on those to >> denote we have modified them. > > I thought, mistakenly perhaps, that Centos = RHEL without the RHEL > branding. > > Why would Centos modify a RHEL package before offering the package to > its devoted and appreciative Centos users ? > > We have to modify the source code to remove the branding .. as I explained in the other post. BUT, I do want to point out that the CentOS Team has never said CentOS = RHEL. CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL source code, built in the order that it is released by Red Hat. And we do modify it to meet the Red Hat trademark requirements (ie, remove Red Hat branding). Just because we build the source code in the order that it is released does not mean it is an exact copy of RHEL .. and in fact, CentOS Linux certainly is NOT an exact copy of RHEL, nor has it ever been. This is because both build systems (the CentOS one and the RHEL one) are "closed systems" and they are certainly not identical. Why is that? Red Hat freezes a Fedora tree to start a new RHEL tree at some "point in time" and they start stabilizing that tree. For RHEL 7, that was near the Fedora 18/19 time frame. They remove many packages that they are not going to use and they develop a set of binary packages that they are going to use as their initial binary tree. They then spend a long time on that tree , building many packages iterations, before they release their RHEL public beta. Just as a point of reference, Fedora 18 was released on 2013-01-15 (Jan 15, 2013) and Fedora 19 was released on 2013-07-02 (July 2, 2013). Their RHEL7 initial tree was likely sometime between those dates. RHEL-7 Beta was released on 2013-12-11 (December 11th, 2013) .. so Red Hat likely spent somewhere between 4 and 11 months (closer to 11, I would think) stabilizing that beta tree. When they released the RHEL-7 beta on December 11th, 2015, the CentOS team had that set of Source Code and binary RPMs and Fedora 18 and Fedora 19 to use to do our initial build. Red Hat had a closed and staged build system with any number of intermediary builds in their build root, not just 2 fedora builds and the 1 RHEL beta. When we built our Beta from that limited set of packages, there is no way that we could duplicate the exact intermediary builds .. no one outside of the people who have access to that closed Red Hat build system even KNOWS the iterations in that build system. Red Hat then took input from their beta release (from users and testing) and did an RC on April 3rd, 2015, and a final QA release on June 9th, 2014 (6 months later). We (the CentOS team) did not get any of their closed build system info then either. We had our beta (based on their beta), our RC (based on their RC), and Fedora 18 and Fedora 19. They had a closed build system with like several thousand other package iterations in it. So, that is why CentOS is NOT a CLONE of RHEL .. it is instead a rebuild of the RHEL source code in way to produce a Linux distribution which is "functionally compatible" (meaning it does the same things) as RHEL. But you will find, if you do direct comparisons of all the binaries and libraries, that almost every single one of the CentOS files is different in md5sum from the RHEL counterparts. To reiterate, CentOS is built using the RHEL source code .. but it is NOT even close to being a CLONE of RHEL. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20150805/7d277bf0/attachment-0005.sig>