On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 07:09:57AM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
What do you think?
First, sorry that this email probably doesn't thread will with either one or the other target mailing lists... I had to pick one to thread with, and other slightly loses. The downside of the initial email not being sent to both MLs at once. :(
Yeah, I decided to send the message to both lists roughly simultaneously rather than cross-post because I figured only a few of us are subscribed to both. I see you went the other way, so we'll see how that goes in this subthread. :)
In concept, I certainly see value in bringing CentOS and Fedora closer. However, I think eliminating Fedora variants in favor of CentOS Stream ones (aka rhel-rawhide based variants) is probably premature. There are several issues with doing this as it currently stands:
To be clear, I don't think this should be done in a rush. I hope to convince poeple that it's a good idea in principle and then work to get there.
- CentOS Koji is pretty closed to a couple of folks in CentOS and Red
Hat. This also includes blocking the download of artifacts from Koji. For reasons I don't understand, CentOS is still gated by the RHEL QE folks, and thus RPMs built in Koji cannot be downloaded until they are finally published. This ruins any testing/development before releasing
I think this is a temporary state while opening up previously-internal development to CentOS Stream. There are plenty of security and partner-privacy related issues that need to be solved and I don't blame Red Hat (or CentOS!) for taking that slowly.
- The CentOS community is simply not mature enough to take on the
role Fedora does in any meaningful capacity. We already know that this is a problem even with Fedora EPEL, and I strongly believe the issue would be massively magnified if those transitioned to the CentOS Project. The CentOS community is largely a user community that takes
This is an area where both communities can learn from our separate experiences, expertise, and strengths. Well, this and also your point 3 below.
What I'm more concerned about is that if you eliminate Fedora from any meaningful server based development, you strip all the opportunities
Wait wait wait -- I'm not suggesting that. We *definitely* still need a voice for server development in Fedora. I'm just not sure a user-focused Edition is the right thing for it. Although I agree that Fedora has advanced leaps and bounds in terms of being suitable for server use in the Fedora.next era (and therefore a better upstream for RHEL and CentOS!), none of the user-focused feature ideas of Fedora Server (like Roles) really stuck.
doesn't, it's fixable! That last part is key. With CentOS, it's not, because it has to bounce back into Red Hat first. And Red Hat doesn't really care about issues discovered by CentOS users, and there are no "CentOS developers".
CentOS Stream is about changing that -- the caring about issues discovered by users, at least, and possibly to some degree development, although not "major release" development.
So, what this long email is actually saying is that I think it's an interesting idea to bring the two projects together, but eliminating aspects of Fedora in favor of CentOS is premature because CentOS has not actually developed as a community project. Maybe it's worth revisiting after six years of actual community development?
I guess I'd like to get us working together sooner rather than trying to reconcile after another six months or a year, where decisions made for perfectly good reasons could end up making things harder later.