----- Original Message ----
> From: R P Herrold <herr...@centos.org>
> To: CentOS mailing list <centos@centos.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 3, 2009 6:18:15 PM
> Subject: [CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag
>
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:
>
> > In all fairness to all the rebels, if somebody from the
> > Cento's team would have responded in a timely matter to the
> > original yes/no question of this thread,
>
> ... and an allegedly 'yes or no' question can take three and a
> half 24 line screens to set forth? The world is not so
> simple
>
No Russ, not in this case. The official answer, a few days ago, took exactly
one word line, and one more line (2 answers).
>
> The CentOS project team strives to issue a product and update
> stream that replicates, substantially exactly, warts and all,
> its upstream from freely available sources, to yield binaries
> which are ABI indistinguishable, with a couple of exceptions.
> These relate to eliding trademarked matter and replacing it
> with CentOS trademarked and copyrighted art; and providing a
> suitable updater mechanism (as the sources for the server side
> of 'up2date' are not FOSS and have not been released -- at all
> when the project started, and still not in full even to the
> present day)
>
I agree with you 100%, I understand the goal of Centos, and I use Centos
because of exactly that goal of trying to be 100% RH compatible. And to take
it a step further, I do relate (RH and 100% RH compatibility) with stability,
stability which I rather have even at the expense of having to put up with 3
year old versions of applications such as php and others.
BUT... when someone from the Centos team makes a statement like "...latest
release has many up-to-date desktop packages..." or any other statement that
might imply, suggest, hint, or even smell of breaking compatibility with RH,
for whatever reason, I think a lot of users will start looking for alternatives.
Again, if your goal is to be 100% compatible with RH, then RH dictates the
package version. And just in case some people are not very clear on RH's goals
for the foreseeable future:
"It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no
plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market
in the foreseeable future."
http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-hat-desktop-systems-an-update/
This does not mean that other/extra repositories can't and don't exist, but it
should always be made crystal clear (and it has been a few days ago), that the
base is never compromised.
bn
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