On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 11:43:39AM -0600, Troy Dawson wrote:
> If I have my way, Scientific Linux 5 continues on as has been planned. 
> We build Scientific Linux 5 ourselves, and let CentOS do what they want.

For RHEL5/SL5/CentOS5 the inertia and momentum are too big and the ETA
is too near to do anything else.

But the idea of getting together is a good one. A lot of synergy can
come out of this, both on the developer side, as well as the
infrastructure, build or mirror. For example I'm not mirroring CentOS,
because I think it's a waste of space to have twice the same bits
around, and most other mirrors think the same, so they go either
CentOS or SL. And users are confused as well in whether to go CentOS
or SL. Documentation is yet another topic that could be shared. So
there are really many reasons to get together sooner than later.

This year seems to be the merger year anyway as many 3rd party repos
are trying to get together to form only one repo. The discussion there
is also to what to build against, RHEL, CentOS or SL?  A single, big
free CentOS/SL merged standard RHEL-clone would of course make that
choice rather easy.

> If SLC wants to save some effort, they can always just put their 
> customized rpm's into a repository that we'll happily put as an optional 
> repository with the plain Scientific Linux.

Maybe the above unified 3rd party repo for Fedora/RHEL could be a
harboring place, too. Ideally I see the end of 2007 to have a bigger
common CentOS/SL community and a big 3rd party repo that serves both
add-ons and replacement packages (in separate subrepos) with many
contributors.

For RHEL5.0 it is far too late, but I wouldn't wait until RHEL6,
that's too far out and things will get cold by then. If there is still
interest talk with the CentOS folks and maybe CentOS 5.1 and SL 5.1
will be the same thing.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net