silly question

Posted Mar 29, 2011 0:18 UTC (Tue) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475)
In reply to: silly question by coriordan
Parent article: Supporting CentOS

my feeling is that a lot of it is QA.

See http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-March/10838...

You download the upstream src rpms, build them, but by default they link to different versions of libraries than upstream. While this doesn't necessarily mean it will be buggy or behave differently than upstream, it might. Now you have to go in and fix that. And you spend hours doing it for a build. Then rebuild and repeat.

As I understand it, if they release with it wrong, it can be next to impossible for them to release a fix and have yum upgrade to the fix. They have to have package numbering exactly like upstream due to third party packages that rely on those numbers, so they can't bump a number to get yum to upgrade a package. So, they want to make sure it is perfect before releasing it.

I have no inside knowledge of the project, so I won't speak beyond that.

silly question

Posted Mar 29, 2011 7:15 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

They can bump a version but they have do it differently inorder to not screw up the versioning. So if they want to update from foo 0.1-1 to a newer version, instead of doing a foo 0.1-2, they do a foo 0.1-1.el5-1 and if upstream does a foo 0.1-2, it will be considered a upgrade.

silly question

Posted Mar 29, 2011 13:16 UTC (Tue) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475) [Link] (1 responses)

yes, they can do that, if necessary, but it would cause breakage with third party software.

see http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2011-March...

The problem isn't with yum or the ability to create intermediate versions technically, the problem is third party commercial vendors match the string exactly, and when centos does foo 0.1-1.el5-1 , it will break the installers and/or startup scripts from those vendors. And the point of running centos is to not have those problems.

silly question

Posted Mar 29, 2011 13:28 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Derivatives already do tagging differently for various packages and there are ISV apps that string match /etc/redhat-release and it fails on them etc. It is a manageable problem if one wants to take the extra effort required.