Hello, I'm from the NSF Middleware Initiative (nsf-middleware.org). We've been charged with developing a collection of middleware to help scientists and researchers use the Internet to share instruments, data, compute power, and collaborate with colleagues. When we say "develop" we don't mean write everything ourselves - all the software we want to use is already out there, but it's difficult for a scientist end-user to put it all together, which is where we come in. This is very similar to what RedHat has done for the Linux community - if you want, you could go out and download everything yourself, but most people prefer to use the pre-packaged and tested distribution that RedHat provides. We're also similar in that many of the developers of the packages we want to include will be associated with the NMI group, just like RedHat employs a number of kernel developers, GNOME developers, GCC maintainers, etc. We also expect that there may be times where the needs of the NMI releases may conflict with where the developers of the packages want to spend their efforts, so we anticipate that what we release may not be exactly what is in a project's CVS tree. Again, RedHat has certainly faced this in the past :) I'm curious how RedHat manages it's releases, especially while balancing the needs of RedHat users against the fact that most of the code in your product comes from somewhere else. For the next release of RedHat, does the CEO wake up one morning and decide "We should ship 7.3 in two weeks", and everyone scurries off to download the latest of the 1000 packages that make it up, put them into RPM's, and ship it out? :) Does RedHat maintain a CVS tree of everything that's continually evolving, and whenever your release cycle demands it you start to freeze that tree and do a release from that? How do you manage importing updates, and keeping whatever patches you may have to apply straight from release to release? I'm really looking forward to hearing back from you all - we think that based on the quality of releases that RedHat has put out over the past few years, you must have come up with a way to successfully manage all the issues we're worried about, and we'd really like to learn as much as we can from you. Thanks! -Erik
