CentOS - Jul 2015 - Fedora change that will probably affect RHEL

Warren Young wrote:

> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS installs
> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc. 
Is that true, I wonder?
For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
about their users (or what their users want).

Is anything known about the ratio of RHEL to CentOS machines?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 02:17:23AM +0200, Timothy Murphy
wrote:
> Is that true, I wonder?
> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
> about their users (or what their users want).
I can't speak for CentOS, but Fedora, at least, this is absolutely not
true. It's just a difficult and expensive thing to do in a meaningful
way (and there's considerable concern that doing it in a non-scientific
way does more harm than good). So, we do the best we can given the
channels we have.



-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>
wrote:
> Warren Young wrote:
>
>
>> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
>> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
>
> Is that true, I wonder?
> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
> about their users (or what their users want).
This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear that
Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL and
convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.


-- 
Chris Murphy

On 07/28/2015 09:01 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at
eircom.net> wrote:
>> Warren Young wrote:
>>
>>
>>> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
>>> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
>>
>> Is that true, I wonder?
>> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
>> about their users (or what their users want).
This is just wrong .. we have started Special Interest Groups where
people from other places come in a build things that they want who are
the users (community).  We have guys from arm companies (helping do
arm64), Citrix (adding xen support in CentOS-6 and CentOS-7), IBM
(building a ppc64 and ppc64le arch), Openstack (via RDO), Open Nebula,
Project Atomic, Storage (via glusterfs and ceph) etc.  We have guys from
CERN helping run our Koji Community Build System.  The CentOS-Devel
list, where all this feedback is occuring has grown by 10 times since we
started the SIG programs.  We have several projects in the 2015 Google
Summer of Code where the community has input into add on projects for
CentOS (like a 32 bit armv7 image builder).
> 
> This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear that
> Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
> hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
> if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL and
> convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.
> 
> 
This is also true that CentOS Linux, the base, is just a plain rebuild
of RHEL source code.  That is what it is and what it will always be ..
the SIGs (where are building much community interaction) are optional
addons to that base.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL:
<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20150728/d7a9eec5/attachment-0001.sig>

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 08:01:21PM -0600, Chris Murphy
wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at
eircom.net> wrote:
> > Warren Young wrote:
> >
> >
> >> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
> >> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
> >
> > Is that true, I wonder?
> > For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
> > about their users (or what their users want).
> 
> This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear that
> Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
> hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
> if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL and
> convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.
> 
As the one who started this thread, and has watched it explode, I feel like
a troll, and apologize to everyone. 

I've seen various decisions made by Fedora, which weren't even
necessarily
bad for its apparent target audience, the desktop user, that, while not
insurmountable, get put into RHEL, and therefore CentOS.

Fedora has made several decisions where a developer or developers will
ignore popular opinion.  I remember when pkgkit would allow any user to
update through the GUI without authentication and it took the story making
the front page of slashdot to get it changed.  

Like any organization, Fedora has some people who are very responsive to user 
input and others who aren't.  To me the reason to make noise about
something in Fedora is to try to keep it from getting into RHEL and hence
CentOS.


-- 
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> No, I am making the assumption that the vast majority of CentOS
installs
>>> are racked up in datacenters, VPS hosts, etc.
>> Is that true, I wonder?
>> For some reason Fedora and CentOS seem reluctant to find out anything
>> about their users (or what their users want).
> This is confusing. I think it's overwhelmingly, abundantly clear that
> Fedora care about their users and are listening. CentOS cares with a
> hard and fast upper limit which is binary compatibility with RHEL. So
> if you want to change CentOS behavior you'd have to buy into RHEL and
> convince Red Hat, and then it'd trickle down to CentOS.
You (and others) are misunderstanding my off-the-cuff remark.
It was purely an observation about the lack of statistics.
I rarely if ever see a statement of the kind
  "Among Fedora users 37% use KDE and 42% Gnome".
Or (after the remark I was responding to)
  "83% of CentOS machines are in datacenters, and 7% are
home-servers".
(Or "x% of Fedora users have turned SELinux to permissive".)

I'm not saying that Fedora or CentOS should work on democratic principles.
I welcome Johnny Hughes unambiguous statement that CentOS follows RHEL.
This saves a lot of time arguing about things that cannot be changed.

But I hold the (old-fashioned?) view that before expressing an opinion
one should get the facts.




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin