CentOS 6 release??

[NedSlider]

[quote]
loconut wrote:

Some of the user-facing people of CentOS on IRC and in the forums come off as grumpy teenagers with a strong complex of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or else I shall "fart in your general direction" (Monty Python) with regards to progress. Negativity has a more memorable face- it takes a lot of happy developers being very nice to customers (yes! customers!) to offset even one grumpy/arrogant one.
[/quote]

Hi loconut

Welcome to the forums.

Whilst I personally agree wholeheartedly with the vast majority of your post, as a CentOS forum moderator I must with the greatest of respect question your inclusion of the forums in your disapproval.

We, at the forums, have strived to be as informative as possible and have collated all available information in single threads to aid dissemination of that information. We too largely disapprove of the way users are belittled on IRC and genuinely strive to be different here at the forums. We genuinely care about our fellow users. Often our hands are tied with respect to the information we are allowed to pass on but that doesn't change our philosophy or willingness to assist our fellow forum members the best we can. I sincerely hope we are not failing in that mission.

All I can tell you is my own personal best guess as to when we might all see CentOS 6, and to be honest I don't have any further information than is already available. My personal guess is that I'd be very surprised to see CentOS 6 released this month. IMHO March is probably the earliest realistic release date given the work that still needs to be done. Please don't interpret that as a March release date (it could be April, May, never for all I know!), just that I don't see any evidence to lead me to believe it will be finished in February. I might be wrong. I hope that helps.

[loconut]

[quote]
Whilst I personally agree wholeheartedly with the vast majority of your post, as a CentOS forum moderator I must with the greatest of respect question your inclusion of the forums in your disapproval.
[/quote]

It was in light of the conversation a page back leading up to my post. Whether the user is a contributory member of CentOS or not, I don't know, but unfortunately he colors my experience. I've popped into IRC a handful of times over the last few years under various names, but admittedly have less overall experience with the fourms. I'm willing to concede my overall picture of the forums may be inaccurate as a result of having read this thread, but in a sense that illustrates my point about negativity having a more memorable face.

[quote]
We, at the forums, have strived to be as informative as possible and have collated all available information in single threads to aid dissemination of that information...
[/quote]
I appreciate what you're saying here, and I'll try to keep an open mind as I experience more of the forums.

[quote]
All I can tell you is my own personal best guess as to when we might all see CentOS 6...[/quote]
I appreciate the estimate, and would have loved something half as useful back in december/january, but I personally don't even need one now as I've paid the ransom to TUV, but as I said even a percentage of completion on the website would have made me happy, especially if I could have watched that percentage bar over the last year to get a feel for the overall development rate.

When EL7 comes around, if CentOS will make a concerted effort to be more open in communication about milestones, I'll donate at least one TUV subscription fee's worth. I read in another thread recently that changes in the upstream product, whether intentional or not, have made EL6 a particularly tough release. Having this information on the website in addition to progress bar, and other status updates would have been wonderful. I followed Karanabir's twitter for a while but it was pretty quiet for a while and ultimately didn't really give me any hints as to "what's done, what's left". That's really all I was ever looking for, but for some reason all of my attempts to get at that were met with the sort of attitude I described.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[pschaff]

[quote]
loconut wrote:
...
I appreciate the estimate, and would have loved something half as useful back in december/january, but I personally don't even need one now as I've paid the ransom to TUV, but as I said even a percentage of completion on the website would have made me happy, especially if I could have watched that percentage bar over the last year to get a feel for the overall development rate.[/quote]
Agree that some public indication of progress would be good to have. A %complete is difficult to judge, as even after the first round of packages is 100% built and fed to the QA team, the ISOs must then be generated and installation tested, as well as testing of individual packages, finding missed trademarks and graphics, etc. It often takes quite some time and several sets of ISOs for the QA process to declare the ISOs ready for prime time. Harking back to WhiteBox days, I recall at least one BrownBag release (i.e. had to be recalled), and we would like to avoid that.

[loconut]

[quote]
It often takes quite some time and several sets of ISOs for the QA process to declare the ISOs ready for prime time.
[/quote]

The typical thing to do would be to consider that whole process, or sections of that process, as a percentage value of some amount- and maybe the bar jumps 10-20% before/after. I don't think anybody's looking for down to the package and to-do item with a multiple decimal accuracy :)

[jpalmer]

I could not resist posting ...

I used to use WhieBoxLinux and promoted as a solution whoever I can in past...
(people are old enough would remember WhiteBoxLinux phenomenon)

Then, the Centos come alone, the person behind WhiteBoxLinux joined his efforts (I think)
Dag Wiers joined in etc.

BUT SEEING THE LATEST BETRAYAL.......

It is time to move on folks, like me the old dinosaur.

It is time to find another distro, that more suitable to us ...

End of my words. I had enough of all this excuses.

Best Regards
John Palmer

[CamargoBP]

Wow guys... if you want a fast release, CentOS is NOT for you. Traditionally CentOS is not fast. It's usually behind. Just because RHEL 6 is out doesn't mean CentOS will be ready soon.

Have you ever repackaged thousands of RPMs? It takes time, lots of it.

I personally want a stable release. No half baked anything. We run production with CentOS an expect reliability. If you need it that bad, go get the srpms from RHEL yourself, repackage all the packages as to meet licensing requirements and then you can have your own distro you can legally use. Or be patient.

-Bret

[pschaff]

[quote]
jpalmer wrote:
I could not resist posting ...

I used to use WhieBoxLinux and promoted as a solution whoever I can in past...
(people are old enough would remember WhiteBoxLinux phenomenon)

Then, the Centos come alone, the person behind WhiteBoxLinux joined his efforts (I think)[/quote]
Just for the sake of historical accuracy, [url=http://whiteboxlinux.org/]WhiteBox[/url] one-man-show John Morris of the [url=http://library.beau.org/]Beauregard Parish (Louisiana, USA) Library[/url] was never part of CentOS. Johnny Hughes did hang out extensively on WhiteBox lists, and became a core CentOS contributor, but has not been seen in these parts for some time. Lance Davis, Donovan Nelson, and Karanbir Singh were also found on WhiteBox lists.

[quote]
Dag Wiers [sic] joined in etc.

BUT SEEING THE LATEST BETRAYAL.......[/quote]
Not sure what that is all about, but it sounds rather inflammatory. Dag Wieers did resign from the CentOS core team over some "creative differences" but still shows up on lists and the fora.

[quote]
It is time to move on folks, like me the old dinosaur.

It is time to find another distro, that more suitable to us ...[/quote]
Best of luck with that.

[quote]
End of my words. I had enough of all this excuses.[/quote]
Haven't seen any excuses here - reasonable and unreasonable discourse, explanations or attempted explanations, inexcusable rudeness perhaps, not anything I'd call an excuse. Opinions may differ. :-)

If you find a better solution for your needs it would be good to hear what that turns out to be, but as your words have ended, guess we'll never know. ;-)

[AlanBartlett]

I've never seen so many posts made to a thread in one 24 hour period. They certainly provided me with "catch-up" reading material . . . ;-)

[quote]
Does this mean that Phil (and possibly Alan) are just as fed up with the protracted wait for Centos 6
[/quote]
[b]nwuk1[/b] -- No, not at all. I help in a variety of places. And, for the record, I am running [i]RHEL 6.0[/i] on my laptop, [i]CentOS 5.5[/i] on my desktop workstation. The [url=http://elrepo.org]ELRepo Project[/url] uses [i]RHEL 4, 5 & 6[/i] build-systems for all its work. :-)

[ot]
North West United Kingdom -- Although I was born in South East London, I spent many happy years in Liverpool from the early 1970s to 1980, complete with a season ticket to a certain football club. Also for the record, [b][color=FF0000]red[/color][/b] is my favourite colour! :-D
[/ot]

[nwuk1]

Oooh Alan, pleased that you spent time in the North West but red is your colour? I wish you had said WHITE!! (Can you guess who I support?? :-P) Merseyside is not Lancashire just as GNU's not Unix :-D

To the poster(s) earlier who have paid for a RHEL subscription, please do give Scientific Linux a try. I posted a couple of links earlier on this thread as I have downloaded it myself. So far I am very pleased with SL6. I can heartily recommend it. I am a private individual / home user so buying a RH subscription isn't exactly cheap for me. For others who, like me, like Red Hat but can't really afford the Enterprise support cost SL represents a really good alternative.

Being honest. I do have some sympathy with Centos stalwarts out in the wild who are frustrated with the fairly obvious disconnection between the Centos team and it's user base. However, we can't really describe ourselves as customers, we are more like hangers on benefiting from the work of a team of volunteers that produce Centos. But, with respect to the poster(s) who spout the usual "roll your own or buy a RHEL license" that really is a bit of a cop out IMHO. Centos is a bit like a motorway (freeway). If it isn't there nobody will complain but if it is and it's congested or slow EVERYONE will complain. Centos doesn't set itself up to be a free version of RHEL but ultimately, that is exactly what it is. Anybody within Centos who doesn't get that is very naive IMO. Don't bitch, moan, whine and complain when people do get annoyed if what has been there before suddenly is unattainable or takes forever to catch up with the Enterprise market. Talk to your user base, create relationships, include people, work with people but above all respect your user base. Linux distros are a bit like fashion. They come and go and come back again (sometimes..... Slackware for example). I have no doubt that there are Centos developers who see working on Centos as a way to enhance their personal career prospects and that's fine, I have no problem with that. However, if you poke your head up above the parapet don't be surprised if it gets shot off :lol:

As good as the Centos developers probably are, some customer facing skills would not go amiss. It's not enough to say "they're techies and don't really relate to people"). Let's put it this way Centos guys, how would you feel if you reworked RHEL into a Centos distro but nobody else downloaded it or used it? I suspect Centos would very quickly disappear just as other Linux Distros have done in the past. In other words, you're only going to survive if you capture AND RETAIN a large user base. You will only sustain and grow a large user base if you include that user base in what you are doing. The one good thing about Linux is that there is a sh*tload of choice out there. If Centos is to survive then quite frankly the team really does need to have more of a marketing edge. Centos developers might argue "we don't care". That's fine, you don't need to care but don't be surprised if within a few years Centos is a thing of the past, a memory that resides down Nostalgia Lane.

The open source / Free Software movement is only as good as the community that supports it. Lose sight of that and it's game over. There is a very large queue of talented people waiting to fill any void you might create.....

Bottom line is that we need Centos and Centos needs us. Simple Symbiosis guys....

[bjgood]

[quote]
AlanBartlett wrote:
I've never seen so many posts made to a thread in one 24 hour period. They certainly provided me with "catch-up" reading material . . . ;-)

[quote]
Does this mean that Phil (and possibly Alan) are just as fed up with the protracted wait for Centos 6
[/quote]
[b]nwuk1[/b] -- No, not at all. I help in a variety of places. And, for the record, I am running [i]RHEL 6.0[/i] on my laptop, [i]CentOS 5.5[/i] on my desktop workstation. The [url=http://elrepo.org]ELRepo Project[/url] uses [i]RHEL 4, 5 & 6[/i] build-systems for all its work. :-)

[ot]
North West United Kingdom -- Although I was born in South East London, I spent many happy years in Liverpool from the early 1970s to 1980, complete with a season ticket to a certain football club. Also for the record, [b][color=FF0000]red[/color][/b] is my favourite colour! :-D
[/ot][/quote]

Dude,
Since you were hanging around Liverpool in the early 70s did you ever see any of The Beatles (John, Paul, George, or Ringo) or visit The Cavern? As you can tell I'm still a BIG Beatles fan, and always will be....:-).

Sorry about this silly question but the word Liverpool conjures up The Beatles...at least in my mind. And, besides, the time frame was perfect (early 70s).

Thank you.

Later....