Re: What is Fedora?
On 6/22/23 06:21, Gordon Messmer wrote:
That's how I understand it well and I'm a bit confused what's the
"fuss" about. The git.centos.org mirrored sources that were used to build
CentOS. Since CentOS is no longer supported, and we have the CentOS Stream, the same is
true - the sources are still available, just at different location [0]. So this
doesn't seem like RH is "locking things down", just getting rid of things
that are not needed anymore.
Note that I'm in a no way endorsing the change, I'm just trying to understand
what's the big deal (if there's any).
[0] https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms
[1] https://vault.centos.org/centos/8-stream/
The big deal is that it sends wrong signals at the wrong time. Within the last few weeks,
we had out of the blue (pun intended):
- Lay-off of the Fedora Program Manager
- Dropping LO packages and dependencies the hard way (orphan first, announce later when
the rubbles are crumbling)
- Retreating from GPL's source distribution requirement to the bare minimum (or less,
I'm no lawyer)
In each case, the way it was done and communicated was literally begging for bad press.
In the specific case of RHEL srpms, it makes life harder for EPEL packagers because you
can't look at the source easily when they are problems between RHEL and EPEL packages.
It matches well with RH's standard of shipping libraries without headers etc - it is
easier for them and limits the scope of support contracts but makes upstream's life
harder.
So, the signal is either "we don't care about our upstream" or "we do
not understand upstream's importance and concerns".
And that is why packagers may consider dropping EPEL branches and let RH pick from Fedora
what they want - at the expense of having to support it themselves. That will reduce RHEL
to a pure enterprise distribution without community. Is that what their customers want?
Groundhog day.