Getting a new package added to CentOS

[R P Herrold]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Mike Schwartz wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Charles Jones
> <charles.jones at ciscolearning.org> wrote:
>>  Craig White wrote:
>>  On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 14:01 -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
>>  Craig White wrote:
>>  On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 13:57 -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
>>  I'm on a quest to get Hobbit Monitor ( 
>> http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon ) added to 
>> several linux

'Lots of back and forth with speculation without asking or 
research', I was thinking as I read the thread.  I'll speak 
only from my personal knowledge and observations, and would 
note that this in no way constitutes any sort of statement by 
any one but yours truly.

>> distros. Someone has already gotten it into Mandriva and 
>> Debian. I sort of volunteered to package it for Fedora 
>> (hopefully fc9), and CentOS.

>> I believe that dag is starting to bundle for EPEL too...

nope -- He was driven away with torches and pitchforks ;) -- 
the details are painful and recurrent with the Fedora folks 
holding to a policy of 'their way or the highway' as I see it.

This battle has raged since before CentOS existed, and at the 
end of the day, the long time 'independent packagers' cannot 
help but get tired of being a punching bag for the political 
nitpicking and posturing of the Fedora folks (who seem to 
posture well, but 'play well with others', less well.)  Then 
the packagers stop wasting their time on fedora, and turns 
back to productive pursuits (like actually packaging, running 
build systems, and the like).  I carry 529 packagings, it 
seems.  'Most all work with all CentOS versions:
     http://www.owlriver.com/projects/ORC/

Inter-repository co-operation is useful, as it prevents 
complaints from a casual user; clearly externally marking 
which repositority provided which package in a simple
 	rpm -q (packagename)
Such efforts have been torpedoed by 'onlookers' with 
@redhat.com in their email addresses.  Transcripts make this 
clear.

>>  What's the difference between EPEL and CentOSPlus ?

At the end of the day -- EPEL is the captive of Red Hat; the 
independent packaging efforts are not.  Red Hat committed to, 
and then backed away from its commitment to set up a 
freestanding foundation to make Fedora decisions -- their 
right, as they own it lock stock and barrel.

cAos, and later the centos-sub project to cAos (later spun out 
as a free-standing project) were a reaction for a need for 
freedom for RH derived RPM based packaging distributions.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-May/msg00156.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-June/msg00031.html

There as a meeting at FOSDEM last weekend -- perhaps things 
will get better.

We'll see.. I've not heard a formal report yet.

my $0.02

-- Russ Herrold