[WBEL-users] Updates - who wants some?

[Johnny Hughes]

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 19:58 +0100, Vic wrote:
> > What is the advantage of using your RPMs (and bandwidth) over using the
> > CentOS rpms (which already has a mirror network)?
> 
> Last time I looked (and this was a little while ago - I suppose I should
> have re-checked), CentOS weren't quite so picky about staying as close to
> the RHEL sources as John has been...
> 

I have stayed out of this thread for a while now, but I thought I would
put out some facts ... but before I do, I thought I would say that John
Morris has done an outstanding job and WBEL is a fine project.  If it
works for you (you as in any WBEL user) then by all means, stay with it.

I am not trying to make anyone switch projects, however here are the
facts.

---------------------
1.  CentOS has different repositories ... the Base and Update repos are
what is in the upstream product plus yum, that is pretty much it.  In
fact, they are probably MORE compatible in that all the system-
config-????? scripts are still as close to upstream as possible and not
renamed centos-config-??????.  If you take into account that CentOS uses
yum and that we have fixed a couple bugs (the release notes have a list
of all the packages), then the base and update repos are as close as you
can get to the upstream product and not be sued.

2.  As William Hooper said in another post, there used to be the issue
that CentOS booted the i586 kernel to install (this was only a CentOS-4
issue as EL3 boots an i386 kernel in all rebuild and upstream).  This
did not effect the kernel that was installed on anyone's machine (if you
had an i686 machine, it still installed i686 kernel, so no impact
there).  It did, however, impact 3rd party drivers that were written for
the i686 boot process.

As William also said, that was fixed (in version 4.2) so that the boot
installer now boots an i686 kernel unless you specifically tell it to
boot i586.  This makes the 3rd party driver issue be gone.

3.  CentOS has the added benefit that if you choose to, you can add
things like a CentOSPlus kernel (that supports xfs, jfs, reiserfs,
firewire support, etc.).  CentOSPlus also has mysql-5 and php-5 support.
The Extras directory has things like apt, xfce, horde, drbd, heartbeat.
Those repos are maintained by CentOS, but they are optional.

For more info about CentOS repositories and what they do, see this wiki
article:

http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories

You can be as close to upstream as you want ... OR ... you can get other
things if you choose.

4.  There are other issues besides just updates ... there are respins of
ISOs to support more hardware (the 3-4 times annually that the upstream
people release update sets) ... CentOS releases the respins 2-3 weeks
after the are done upstream every update set cycle.

5.  CentOS also releases the CS / GFS items in a repository for both
CentOS-3 and CentOS-4.

6.  CentOS has more than 130 world wide public mirrors and more than 20
internally owned (in EU, US, and Asia) CentOS servers to push updates.

7.  CentOS is community based and readily accepts input from the
community, there are currently 13 developers (and many other
contributors of test packages and wiki content).  CentOS welcomes
community involvement for test packages and for wiki content.

8.  The default CentOS yum update system is GeoIP based and provides 10
failover mirrors that can be ranked by speed to the individual computer
(when using the optional fastestmirror yum plugin).

9.  CentOS has had more than 1 million unique IP addresses download
updates via yum/up2date against our 20+ internal update servers in the
last 6 months (all the time we maintain stats for).  This is despite the
fact that the default update system prioritizes the external public
mirrors and only gives out the centos mirrors on the mirrorlist IF there
are not at least 10 geographically close external public mirrors.  We
have no hard data concerning how many updates are happening via the
default external mirrors, except to say that our traffic went to 1/3
when we implemented it ... so about 2/3 of the updates or 2 million more
IPs is estimated on those.
------------------------------------------------

I would suggest that you might better serve the community by adopting
some RPMS that are not in RPMFORGE or one of the optional CentOS repos
and making that available (CentOS happily adds items to our testing repo
and will move them to extras or centosplus after user testing) or by
joining the centos-docs list and contributing to the wiki.centos.org
site.  CentOS already has the ability to distribute these items all
around the world.

Again ... this is not to suggest anyone move from WBEL, or to discourage
anyone from maintaining updates for WBEL.  I was trying to become
involved in WBEL updates and help it become more community based in the
beginning of WBEL and again at EL4 beta release time.  It was clear at
that time that John Morris did not want WBEL to go in the direction of
major community involvement (that is not good or bad, just a fact).

Lance Davis then asked me a simple question ... Why create/help an
entity (anyone remember whiteboxlinux.com/whiteboxlinux.net) that is not
really supported by the developer of the distro when you can become
involved in community based distro that is looking for help?

The Tao Linux project has already retired and David Parsley has been
rolled into CentOS Development Team.

Anyway ... that is my $0.02 on this subject.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
CentOS-4 Lead Developer
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://beau.org/pipermail/whitebox-users/attachments/20061019/87fd70f5/attachment.bin