On Friday 03 June 2005 11:48, Les Mikesell wrote:
> I'd put it this way instead: Red Hat is responsible for any
> difficulty in creating the CentOS distribution, while sharing
> the same upstream developers as all other Linux distributions.
I'd put it this way:
Red Hat makes CentOS possible at all by providing Source RPMs (which they are
not required to do; source doesn't have to be provided in SRPM form to meet
the GPL-covered packages license requirements). The CentOS teams builds upon
a foundation laid; the building is the work of the CentOS team, but it would
fall were it not for the foundation.
Also, while Red Hat may share the upstream developers as all other Linux
distributions, let's not forget that Red Hat (as well as SuSE and others)
employ many of these upstream developers and share their work product open
source with their competitors.
Or, more bluntly, the SRPM tree for RHEL didn't just magically appear out of
nothing. And there is a significant difference in a tree of SRPMs ready to
roll (with some modifications, as Johnny said, since RHEL isn't self-hosted)
and having a tree of upstream tarballs with no spec files to tell where to
put the files, build with the unified options, etc. I have written spec
files, and have maintained a specfile of moderate complexity; spec file
hacking is not trivial. Then there's the work of building an installable ISO
image or image set; this is nontrivial as well.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
