On 13/11/12 21:04, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 08:33:05PM +0100, David Sommerseth wrote:
>> On 12/11/12 22:14, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
 >>
>> ... But I do react to your claim which sounds like you think the upstream
>> developers are clueless and don't care about what they do.
>
> That is not what I said. I did not say they are stupid, I did not say they
> are indifferent or malicious. I said that they are crazy. There is a difference.

You did not use the term "crazy", but you did indicate very well you wanted to 
insult someone.  Insults in general are not something I personally appreciate, 
and feel rather confident I'm not alone in that opinion.  No matter how it is 
expressed.

>> All the code in this Enterprise Linux distro comes from an open source
>> upstream source.  There are usually upstream communities to discuss
>> things with.  And there are communities where you can provide patches
>> fixing things you find not being in a good shape.
>
> There is a minor problem with your suggestion that I send bug fixes
> to upstream:
>
> Upstream is at dracut-024 (Oct-2012), SL6 is at dracut-004 (January-2010).

Yes, you are right.  But you are also wrong.  Yes, SL6 is based on the 
dracut-004 release.  But that does not mean the latest SL6 dracut package is 
comparable to the -004 release any more.  There has been quite some fixes 
since that release.  Just do a 'rpm -q --changelog dracut' and see for 
yourself.  Even better, download the src.rpm and look at the patches applied 
on top of the -004 release.

Just an example.  The latest change to dracut-004-284 contains
0284-fips-set-boot-as-symlink-to-sysroot-boot-if-no-boot-.patch.  This
points at upstream git commit f22f08d857fb239c38daf7099fc55e82506f4abe which 
can be found in the RHEL-6 branch in the upstream git tree.

Important fixes are included and fixed when needed.  So if it doesn't work for 
you, get in touch with upstream and/or file a bugzilla with upstream project. 
  If it is important for RHEL, it will arrive into RHEL at some point too. 
The severity of the issue decides how quickly a fix gets pushed out.  And when 
RHEL pushes out a fix ... then SL gets the fix too.  Bottom line is:  Working 
together with upstream projects does benefit SL too.

Red Hat does a lot of backports.  A package is frozen on a specific version to 
be stabilised when the next RHEL release is being worked on.  From that point 
of, the idea is that fixes and enhancements are backported from newer 
versions.  As an example.  KVM was introduced in the 2.6.20 kernel.  RHEL5 
ships with a 2.6.18 based kernel.  How come RHEL5 supports KVM?

> I can elaborate on how bug fixes to upstream do no good to SL users.

No need.

>> Throwing out such trash which you did will definitely not improve
>> anything.  Upstream developers do really deserve better treatment from
>> us - no matter what we think of their work.
>
> Please refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

I'm very well aware of that fairytale, but I'm not sure why you bring that one 
up in this discussion.  My point is that telling the right people upfront of 
issues generally makes things better.  Ranting behind peoples backs sounds 
more familiar to the fairytale to me.


kind regards,

David Sommerseth