[WBEL-users] Rsync Updates Organizing

[Ben Mohilef]

On 19 Nov 2004 at 19:22, Michiel van Es wrote:

> Oh ..if so..who is providing the feedback for broken packages and
> offering their help to keep the updates up2date?

I am surprised that beau.org hasn't pulled the plug on this mailing 
list. If I were a taxpayer in Beauregard Parish, I would be 
screaming my head off if my library employees were fiddling with 
open source software distribution instead of maintaining my library 
system. 

They have done a wonderful job in getting Whitebox linux started. 
RedHat is doing an excellent job in making the source code 
updates available to people like us who haven't even paid a cent 
for the distribution ( recall the GPL - they only have to provide 
source code to their customers ). 

Rolling your own from the RH Sources is fairly easy (except for 
openoffice which requires 10Gb free in /usr,  as I found out the hard 
way).  

As the comedy of fedoralegacy.org shows, a herd of volunteers 
requires a lot of good organization and a lot of security checking or 
it will fail. If you want to start such a group for whitebox, you are 
certainly free to do so. However, if you do so, be aware that you 
may be held personally liable for the security issues should one of 
the packages end up trojanned. I can see why beau.org would want 
to avoid that situation.

I trust RedHat and Whitebox. Mostly trust Centos. Definitely trust 
my own builds. However, I wouldn't trust a herd effort on any 
machine connected to the internet unless there was a very  
extensive package testing system implemented.