[ewg] Re: RFC OFED-1.3 installation

[Doug Ledford]

On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 20:12 +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> > Look, rpms are just like versioned tarballs.  Once they go out in the
> > wild, that particular name-version-release combination is FROZEN.
> 
> It really looks like this is a work around for when you want to apply
> a patch without going through maintainer.

Not really.  When you have a customer with a sev 1 issue, you don't wait
for upstream to release a new version of gcc before you get them their
fix.

There are also those times when you have an older, long released product
that isn't up to date with upstream, for instance RHEL4 mdadm is 1.12.0
and will not be updated to the 2.6.2 version that's in Fedora.  If I
find a bug in that 1.12.0 version of mdadm, then I'll fix it using a
patch in the spec file.  If the bug also exists in upstream then it will
get sent upstream to be included in the latest upstream release.  But,
upstream won't care about version 1.12.0, and they won't release a new
version 1 mdadm just for our bugfix, so we carry those targeted fixes
around as long as we have that version 1 mdadm on systems.

There are other reasons to do this as well, for instance when you need
to make a change as part of package integration that simply isn't needed
or wanted upstream.  For example, many times upstream couldn't care less
about patches that implement our particular file system layout for a
package.

There are lots of things that we as a distributor have to care about
that upstream generally does not.  The spec file and patches are how we
solve our customer's problems.  They are what make a stable
distribution, as opposed to a "bleeding edge, must always update to
latest upstream version to fix any problem" system, a reality.  It's the
difference between RHEL and Fedora.

> The way OFED release process works, we really don't
> do releases all that often, and when we do, we can coordinate with
> the maintainer.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband
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