What's in a (CentOS) version number?

I'm not even disagreeing with the soundness of the idea. History is full of examples of very intelligent people coming up with very good ideas but not having the skills or the interest necessary organize or influence the correct group of people to work to make it happen. Thankfully you didn't go so far as to file a detailed business method patent as part of your thorough calculation when doing the Pro bono benefit analysis on behalf of the CentOS community. Thank you for showing that much restraint, so as to not be an insurmountable hurdle for others to implement a similar idea months later, when they finally get around to catching up with you.

I believe the phrase is "an idea ahead of its time".. which again is exactly the sort of thing I would expect to see proposed again and again from a skynet android sent from the future. But what do I know, I'm just a self-aware AI from the matrix.

Credit where credit is due, you came up with the idea as far as I can tell. Good for you. I will think about spinning up a fedora badge to honor such impressive prescient thinking moving forward. It's really is an oversight that such effort goes completely unrewarded. Never again.

The only thing I find moderately distasteful is this propensity to jump to conspiracy theories and implication of some sort of behind the scenes strong arming of motivation because other people are moving at a more deliberate speed in implementing a more nuanced plan of action on a timescale slower than you would like to see.

The issue isn't just about where EPEL lives, that's just a part of the question. The issue really is how does CentOS get structured such that CentOS can build a contributor space which is attractive enough to drain as much of the swamp of overlapping/conflicting addon repositories as possible and make it easier to give users the layer cake they seem to want in practice.

Ironically pushing for an EPEL centric merger quickly, as you have proposed here in LWN in January, and seem to still be a proponent of now, smacks as exactly the sort of heavy handed corporate interest interactions that you'd rather not see. It's only because you thought of it that you want to see it done in a rush, without building stakeholder buy-in from inside the CentOS community itself.

Personally, I'm really much happier to see CentOS think about what they want to achieve with expanded resource support from shadowdaddy, without that discussion being dominated by insistent calls to rush EPEL under the CentOS banner. At the end of the process CentOS might come up with a structure where both EPEL and CentOS Extras as they exists today just do not map coherently and will disappear as recognizable distinct things inside the CentOS branded binary content space. Which is where I think they are headed with their variants idea.

-jef