RPM is not the only one [LWN.net]

RPM is not the only one

Posted Aug 23, 2006 7:59 UTC (Wed) by nowster (subscriber, #67)
In reply to: RPM is not the only one by joey
Parent article: Who maintains RPM?

rpm is not the only peice of software that is a major component of many linux distributions but has no agreed-upon upstream maintainer, and thus effectively one fork per distro. Another such peice of software is cron.

There are great problems with communicating with RedHat. Nowadays, there appears to be no named maintainer for many important packages, and using the bugzilla isn't always appropriate, especially with security-related problems.

As one distro's maintainer of several packages based on RedHat/Fedora upstream sources, this is incredibly frustrating. Finding new upstream versions is often a matter of stumbling across them by accident, rather than having a stable location to find them. I used to have read-only CVS pull access to one upstream source but that disappeared without notice one day, and I got bounces from the email address of the person I'd originally been in contact with about it.

Like joey, I get people sending me patches in frustration.

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RPM is not the only one

Posted Aug 23, 2006 11:36 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

You are right about bugzilla not being the right place to handle security issues in many cases. The recommended procedure for Fedora and RHEL respectively are

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Security
http://www.redhat.com/security/team/contact/

cvs versions of all of Fedora is available at

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/

If you have any other issues, feel free to mail me @fedoraproject.org

RPM is not the only one

Posted Aug 24, 2006 9:27 UTC (Thu) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link] (1 responses)

cvs versions of all of Fedora is available at...

Browsing the CVS, no source code is visible at any level, only the occasional Makefile or patch file. I'd email you directly about this, but you didn't give your full email address.

RPM is not the only one

Posted Aug 24, 2006 20:53 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

See if this helps:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/UsingCvsFaq