On 07/07/2014 03:20 PM, Alain Péan wrote:
> It took 27 days to release it after the release oh RHEL 7. It is much 
> better than the release of CentOS 6 (242 days, or 8 months, after the 
> release of RHEL 6).
>
First, both the CentOS and SL teams deserve a great deal of applause and 
thanks for their efforts.  But, since you mention a bit of history here, 
let me add just a bit of context to that 242 day number, ok?  If you 
don't want to read on, just hit delete.

Lest we forget, CentOS 6 was delayed in part by EL5.6 and EL4.9 in the 
same time frame.

I have personally rebuilt EL5.6 from sources (on IA64) and it is a 
time-consuming bit of a challenge to get everything built in the right 
order with the right buildroots; 5.6 took me much longer to get right 
than 5.5, for my purposes, and I wasn't striving for close binary 
compatibility with upstream, either, I was just getting it to build in 
any working form at all (and, of course, I'm not nearly as experienced 
of a builder as any on the CentOS or SL teams).  I also wasn't spinning 
install media.

There are packages in EL5.x, x<6, that will not build on EL5.x, x>5 at 
all, and some of them are still in the current EL5.10 release (and the 
same is true for every point release, not just 5.6, but I had the most 
difficulty with 5.6). As an experiment, try rebuilding all of 5.10 from 
source with only 5.10 packages and you'll see pretty quickly what I'm 
talking about; EL5 has never had the goal of being self-hosting; heh, 
see the remaining 'fc6' tagged packages remaining even in 5.10!.  One 
big offender in 5.6 was gettext, from my rebuild experience (look in the 
centos-devel archives for the subject "Interested in IA64 build" from 
the fall of 2012; I posted a string of build status reports, including 
some dialog on some of the problems I had).  I ran out of my time 
allotment and expense budget at 5.8; I need to allocate a few weeks to 
get everything up through 5.10+updates rebuilt, budget permitting.

To their great credit, the SL team had started earlier with 6 and had 
already changed infrastructure (several months prior, in fact) and were 
quite a bit better prepared at that time than the CentOS team for EL6.0.

If EL6.6 and EL5.11 (neither of which are yet released) were to have 
been released nearly concurrently with EL7 I think the timing would have 
been a lot different, if history is any predictor.