LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem [LWN.net]

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Posted Sep 18, 2008 10:59 UTC (Thu) by dag- (subscriber, #30207)
Parent article: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

I accept most of what Greg had to say (at least through LWN's eyes) but there is one thing I would contest:

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Then, there is the matter of redistributors who base their products on another distributor's work; these are distributors like Ubuntu or CentOS. There are no contributions back to the community from that kind of distributor at all. They are not functioning as a part of the Linux ecosystem.
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CentOS is different than a normal distribution (at least for the core OS) in the sense that our aim is to be 100% compatible with RHEL. That of course means we cannot change anything (except the things we legally have to). Bug-reports and patches go up to Red Hat and we wait for them to be accepted and pour down again.

Now, I don't think CentOS in itself is a big contributor to patches, much like the article already explains why RHEL is not in itself a big contributor. But saying CentOS functions outside the Linux ecosystem is probably one bridge too far and depending how you interpret "ecosystem" it is wrong or intentional :-)

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LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:25 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The presentation itself has more details at

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html

"The "enterprise" release lasts a long time. These packages that were taken is a snapshot in time, that is slowly maintained and updated with bug and security fixes by the developers working for the distros. Those changes and fixes flow back into the original projects for inclusion in their main releases when possible, but for the most part, the majority of changes that go into these releases come from newer releases from the projects, so changes flow predominatly one way into the distro."

Given this, I don't think it was meant as a slight against CentOS. Just a general statement about the nature of enterprise distributions one of which CentOS is based on.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:20 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Dag,

For the most part, patches and fixes that CentOS devs make goes up one step into Red Hat bugzilla. Others go all the way upstream.

The proper counter to all this is the size of the team of people. I think CentOS has 5-8 people who are considered core devs.

Having such numbers/size might balance more of the fixes that Canonical, etc make upstream.