(Joining late..)

On 28/02/07 23:34, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hi,
> This is my last e-mail for the day.  I'm going to go home and think, but
> here are some thoughts.
> 
> First - I think that for at least S.L. 5.0 we should do it completely
> independent of CentOS.  That is for both CentOS's and SL's good.  RHEL5
> has so many different changes in the way they are doing things, that SL
> and CentOS are probably going to do very different things.  I think this
> is a good thing, so that we can look at both ways of making a
> distribution, and determining which, if any, is best.
> So, I'm planning on forging ahead with S.L. 5.0 on our own, no matter
> what we decide for S.L. 5.1.

At least at CERN SL(C)5 is currently not being pushed by any of our user
communities (even if we have sometimes trouble getting laptop/desktop
hardware that is working with SLC4), this is due to a gradual lockdown
before the LHC startup.

Which means we have time to prepare SLC5 as we see fit, and are not
driven by "need to release <X weeks after TUV is out". Like Jarek, I
believe the best time for a change would be between major releases, not
during the "stable" lifetime.

But I agree that looking at the "5" era from two different angles is
going to make the final_and_eventually_unified SL5.x a better product. I
hope that the initial divergence (SL "sites" vs addon "repos") is small
enough to be overcome eventually.

> Cons:
> CentOS does *not* have an open development cycle.  There are no beta's.
>  For the average user, it just comes.

This might be true, but we would still have the freedom to look at beta
releases from TUV ourselves - much as we do now (the rebuilding
infrastructure wouldn't go away, since it might always be required for
"urgent" security updates anyway). And somebody inside CentOS must be
looking at betas, I would guess that if we contribute to CentOS in a
noticeable way, it would not be too hard to join that circle.

Regards
Jan