On Wed, January 7, 2015 09:48, Jonathan Billings wrote:> On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 08:45:29PM -0600, John R. Dennison wrote: >> It's not relevant in _any_ sense. CentOS is nothing more than (at >> it's core) a rebuild of RHEL. This type of nonsense should be >> directed to Red Hat in a Red Hat venue. It's nothing but >> off-topic noise here as CentOS will not deviate from its >> upstream in its core offerings. > > Agreed. > > If you want to participate in how the upstream OS is being shaped, I > suggest looking at the Fedora Project, which is driven by volunteers. > > If you notice the Subject: of this thread, it is "Design changes are > done in Fedora". Pretty clear message. >There is a common word disguised in the letter E that we find in both the initialism RHEL and the acronym CentOS. It is the the word Enterprise. It is my observation that the subscriber base to this list tends to those who have wider responsibilities than deciding what the corporate GUI desktop layout should look like next year. Most here also seem to be somewhat concerned with concepts of cost and benefit. It is evident in many posts that the increasing costs of supporting large numbers of people negatively impacted by changes introduced to CentOS from outside of their span of control is beginning to impinge more and more upon decision making. In some cases that consideration is evidently influencing the decision to deploy CentOS or not. Now, what does the subscriber base to Fedora developers list look like? Well, to begin with there are no fewer than 209 official 'Fedora' lists. Which should one join to 'influence' anything? Let us grant that a number, say half, are self-evidently not of great concern to operational deployment and employment of RHEL, CentOS or SL in the Enterprise environment. The oddly named 'UK-Ambassadors' or the narrowly focused language translation mailing lists for instance. That still leaves in excess of a hundred lists. Where should one apply pressure? What forum exists to discuss the economic costs to Enterprises of introducing a marginal, possibly questionable, improvement to an existing UI or common utility? The devel list? The users list? A perusal of the contents of both the Fedora devel list and users list does not give one much hope that such a point of view would be tolerated, much less welcomed. For example, one the the notable contributors to those forums is himself banned from this list. Further, discussions tend to be far, far down in the weeds, if not subterranean altogether, when viewed from the perspective of the question: what is this change, improvement, alteration or deprecation going to cost the installed base to implement? No, no-one presently on this list is likely to have very much of an impact on the folks that are the Fedora project. Their objectives are far removed from the concerns of those tasked to keep automated systems working and invisible to the Enterprises that employ them. The overarching concern of the Enterprise is to employ capital and labour to produce value; and not simply to prove technologies or advance personal or political agendas. Not that the later two situations are uncommon in the Enterprise either. One might, however, consider that the CentOS list is a concentration of people that evidently have some status within a number of Enterprises. And these influential people have chosen not to pay RH for their offering. It might be of some interest to RH in determining why this is so. It might also be the case that this forum, being concerned with issues such as deployment on a large scale and the costs of upgrading RH flagship product, provides valuable insight on how RH's paying customers might be viewing their product as well. After all, because we use CentOS rather than RHEL and forgo the provision of RH's expert advice, then we ourselves and our organisations are a self-identified technologically advanced user community. And we are concerned more with the entire package than with any particular component or detail. If we have concerns and reservations then perhaps RH should have concerns. If we express them here then there is a chance, a small chance but a chance nonetheless, that someone at RH with a view a little broader than that evidenced in most of the traffic on the Fedora devel list, might take notice. IMHO, FWIW. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:48 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote:> > A perusal of the contents of both the Fedora devel list and users list > does not give one much hope that such a point of view would be > tolerated, much less welcomed.Exactly. They don't care about breakage, only change. In the early days I tried to follow Fedora development and no one paid any attention to complaints about breaking interfaces that other things rely on. I eventually just gave up when they pushed a kernel update mid-rev that wouldn't boot on my (mainstream IBM) test box and subsequent updates were the same. I don't really expect them to care - the people who have something invested in existing components and interfaces have been split out of that community. I just see it as a big mistake to let them control the future of the distribution to people that need stability and ongoing interface compatibility.> One might, however, consider that the CentOS list is a concentration > of people that evidently have some status within a number of > Enterprises.I used to try to encourage using more linux vs.Windows here and deployed Centos for infrastructure myself wherever possible because it used to be easier to manage and more stable. But now that I'm approaching retirement and realizing that the current management processes aren't going to continue to work, I think that may have been a mistake. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
On Jan 8, 2015, at 8:48 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote:> these influential people have chosen not to pay RH > for their offering. It might be of some interest to RH in determining > why this is so.I?ll tell you why we don?t subscribe. First, we don?t need their support. We?re quite capable of coping with problems ourselves, including those problems that are *caused by* Red Hat, or allowed into RHEL by Red Hat?s gatekeepers. We?ve been doing this since the GNU experience meant building executables from tarballs on top of some paid-for commercial Unix. Second, the customers we send these boxes out to don?t *want* Red Hat?s support. They want to call us, not Red Hat. That means we ?own? these boxes' problems. Good thing we?re capable of solving them. There?s a price to not paying Red Hat: we take responsibility for coping with any problems. The CentOS warranty is that if it breaks, we get to keep both pieces. We?re fine with that. Anyone that isn?t fine with that ? those who think someone other than themselves should be responsible for fixing problems with the free OS they?re using ? should be using something else.
On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 10:48:03AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:> After all, because we use CentOS rather than RHEL and forgo the > provision of RH's expert advice, then we ourselves and our > organisations are a self-identified technologically advanced user > community. And we are concerned more with the entire package than > with any particular component or detail. If we have concerns and > reservations then perhaps RH should have concerns. If we express them > here then there is a chance, a small chance but a chance nonetheless, > that someone at RH with a view a little broader than that evidenced in > most of the traffic on the Fedora devel list, might take notice.I think this essentially sums up your point, and elucidates what I think is the error in your thinking. At the point where anything is deployed in CentOS, all the decisions that have been made regarding the technologies in question have been made. The technologies had probably a year of use in Fedora and most likely several months of testing in RHEL's internal development. If you're talking about critical core software, whole infrastructures have been built around it, documentation, build infrastructure, deployment guidelines, etc. I agree that following the Upstream is a significant time investment, however, as the saying goes, "You Get What You Pay For". Posting to a CentOS list asking for change is probably too little, too late. -- Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> wrote:> If we express them >> here then there is a chance, a small chance but a chance nonetheless, >> that someone at RH with a view a little broader than that evidenced in >> most of the traffic on the Fedora devel list, might take notice. > > I think this essentially sums up your point, and elucidates what I > think is the error in your thinking.Yes, it is pretty clearly an error to think anyone else cares. Red Hat will make some money on new training classes helping people cope with the breakage. And CentOS will continue to be a copy with no input. That still doesn't make it any better for the CentOS users of things that now have an expiration date. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
On Thu, January 8, 2015 10:44 am, Les Mikesell wrote:> On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:48 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> > wrote: >> >> A perusal of the contents of both the Fedora devel list and users list >> does not give one much hope that such a point of view would be >> tolerated, much less welcomed. > > Exactly. They don't care about breakage, only change. In the early > days I tried to follow Fedora development and no one paid any > attention to complaints about breaking interfaces that other things > rely on. I eventually just gave up when they pushed a kernel update > mid-rev that wouldn't boot on my (mainstream IBM) test box and > subsequent updates were the same. I don't really expect them to care > - the people who have something invested in existing components and > interfaces have been split out of that community. I just see it as a > big mistake to let them control the future of the distribution to > people that need stability and ongoing interface compatibility. > >> One might, however, consider that the CentOS list is a concentration >> of people that evidently have some status within a number of >> Enterprises. > > I used to try to encourage using more linux vs.Windows here and > deployed Centos for infrastructure myself wherever possible because it > used to be easier to manage and more stable. But now that I'm > approaching retirement and realizing that the current management > processes aren't going to continue to work, I think that may have been > a mistake. >I read it and there are very familiar feelings. Some 7 or so years ago I found myself at a meeting (that was open solaris meeting) with a bunch of people who started looking for alternatives to migrate their boxes to from Linux. (I may be off on time; it was right after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, so there was already this joke out there: how do you call that system? If you repeat Sun-Oracle very fast you likely will get it right: "snorkel" ;-) One of the pushing points was: already then on average every 30-45 days was either glibc or kernel update, meaning you have to reboot the box (and on multiple threads here there was a bunch of other unpleasant things mentioned so I'll skip them...). Linux from Unix-like system became more Windows like (sorry if it offends anyone, but I can't hold myself and not repeat what one of people called Linux then: "Lindoze"). So, several of those people fled to open solaris. My journey was different, I ended up migrating a bunch of most important boxes to FreeBSD. I know how many on this list are already allergic to me saying this, I promise, this is the last time. I'm using as excuse something familiar I feel in James's post... Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On 1/8/2015 8:44 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:> But now that I'm approaching retirement ...is that a promise ? please, hurry up. I, for one, am tired of your diatribes about how change is bad, and I suspect I'm not the only one. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast