[CentOS] How to encourage maintainers to update their software

[Johnny Hughes]

On 10/28/2017 12:28 PM, Japheth Cleaver wrote:
> On 10/27/2017 2:54 PM, Frank Cox wrote:
>>
>> I do that with a number of packages that are either newer or simply
>> not available in the various Centos repos.  In many cases it's as easy
>> as downloading a new tar source file and adding it to the existing
>> source rpm, doing three seconds of editing on the spec file to account
>> for the new update, and compiling the result.  Sometimes it's even
>> easier -- just download a newer Fedora rpm and compile that on your
>> Centos system.
>>
> It would be nice if this remained even a *suggestion* at the Fedora
> layer, but there seems to be from occasional obliviousness to outright
> hostility to the idea of keeping spec files broadly compatible across a
> range of downstream releases and for other RPM-based distributions, or
> not ripping out compatibility at Fedora-speed. (Even leaving aside
> "burn-the-ships" actions like outright banning SysV init scripts.)
> 
> It didn't seem to use to be that case. IMO it makes a lot more sense to
> wrap distro-specific .spec file changes in conditionals and let the
> rpmbuild do the right thing than to post and maintain separate versions
> for Fedora, EPEL, and anything else.

If people want all the newer packages that exist in Fedora .. why not
just use Fedora?

Enterprise distributions are designed to be maintained for 10 years so
when you make an investment of X million dollars in a piece of software,
you can use it for an extended period of time.  Having all the latest
packages is not what Enterprise Linux is about.  That is what Fedora is
about.

Fedora has introduced a new feature called modularity
(https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/).  Eventually, when / if modularity
is rolled into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you will get some more
flexibility in RHEL (and therefore CentOS as we use RHEL sources).

CentOS Linux is a great Linux distribution.  We want everyone to use it.
 But trying to convert CentOS Linux into Fedora is not only redundant
(Fedora already exists .. use it) .. a bastardized version of CentOS
with hundreds of newer manually maintained components is not really
CentOS, and Fedora is likely more stable than that monstrosity anyway.

There are things to add newer pieces to CentOS (SCL SIG, PaaS SIG,
etc.), and those can be done now and integrated into the Enterprise
Distro.  If those are what you need, that is what they're for.

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