2008/10/11 Ralph Angenendt ralph+fedora@strg-alt-entf.org:
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
2008/10/11 Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com:
CentOS should be putting out betas that match the RHEL betas so that you can get access to it before the release. Use Fedora as the technology driver, use Betas as the bugfix cleanup for platform issues, and eventually you get the "Enterprise" release.
I think the major problem with CentOS putting out beta's in a timely basis is that a large amount of time is getting the build resources together AND then deciphering various build variables that RHEL uses so that the CentOS binaries 'match' close enough to be bug for bug compatible. The time to do that basically had a CentOS-5beta out at the time that RHEL-5 is finalized.
Not having publicly available SRPMs for the beta versions (meaning available via public ftp) might be another reason.
I thought the SRPMS were available, as Scientific Linux uses the public ones to build their Betas.
I thought it was more a level of priority. CentOS is a volunteer project with a lot of costs shouldered by the developers. There is usually a shortage of diskspace, slow net links to various build machines spread around the world, the fact that various devs have full time jobs (there is no full-time build manager like Fedora and SciLin have), and various other items. Any of which puts making betas a lower priority than dealing with current issues.