ClearFoundation

As we move forward to the upcoming ClearOS 6.0 we are making beautiful strides with both the development environment and with the new tools which lend themselves for a better management experience for ClearOS. Guys, Peter and the whole development team are geniuses and the framework is beautiful. Importantly, the tools are coming together for better community input and the ability to make community contributed modules available. Included with this is the build system that will be able to crank out ClearOS 6.0 packages for both 32 and 64 bit ClearOS.

The big barrier at this point is the question of remaining dependent on the CentOS or creating ability to lay this framework directly on sources from Redhat. CentOS is scheduling their next release as 5.6 which will be the end of the 5.x series and represents the full maturation of the Redhat 5.x series. We plan on incorporating these improvements as updates/fixes to ClearOS 5.2. As far as we can tell, 6.0 is still on the long distance radar (I may be wrong on this and if I am, please let me know).

That being said, the release of CentOS 6.0 is not likely to happen until well after we are ready to release the new framework tools to the developer community. The code and kernel involved with 6.0 is significant because it contains many, many innovations and improvements that we would like to see and that we'd like to develop into the ClearOS 6.x branch.

The question for the community is what do you think??

We have some build resources that are coming together nicely and the questions are:

1) Now that we have the hardware and the infrastructure to do the raw work, should we commit some valuable time and resources to developing a ClearOS basic ISO that is a raw package libraries of rebuilt and sanitized RHEL (Redhat) 6.0, independent of CentOS?

2) Do we have sufficient community support and volunteers to do the necessary testing and QA on packages and code. (This adds a layer of complexity that is exciting, ambitious, liberating, scary, and causes serious trepidations.) Do we have enough community resources to make this happen?

3) Is there anyone in the general Linux community or the CentOS community that has some advice or directive that may prove useful in this crucial decision making process?

4) What does the end-user community feel? Is it worth the distraction?

Next week we have some serious grind to perform development-wise in the build platform so we need to make a decision by Thursday (Feb 17) of whether to proceed or not.

Please leave some comments and let us know how you feel. If you want to sign up to help, please click here. If you need to send your comments anonymously or directly, please email me at dloper at <ThisDomain>.

I think staying with CentOS is the smart thing to do for now. They already "sanitize" the RHEL image and provide QA for its packages so that in turn translates to less work for you guys and should be a welcomed "free" QA for us.

Personally I don't like fragmenting so many projects/distros its one of the things that hurt our products. Besides, CentOS has already a good name that can only help move ClearOS forward.

If I'm needed I can help with the QA for some packages.

about #4, I think keeping the CentOS filter should remove the distraction of having to do something that has already been done.

PS, don't forget we have an IRC channel in freenode #clearfoundation come say hi! and stay longer than 10mins!

Cheers,
Mike

I want to help, especially if I can by simply running things, and reporting bugs I encounter. I know some code, but not too much about driver programming and that... Don't know how much help I'll be. I do plan on getting 64bit ready ClearBox asap, and possibly running it in my home (read "tinkering with it until the next millenium"). So one way or the other sign me up to pitch in whenever and wherever I can. Especially with the IRC community building that will be necessary regardless. As for keeping CentOS or not, I would say forking has taken us this far, but it does at times seem redundant. That probably sounds contradictory, and I have no excuse.

Miguel wrote:
I think staying with CentOS is the smart thing to do for now. They already "sanitize" the RHEL image and provide QA for its packages so that in turn translates to less work for you guys and should be a welcomed "free" QA for us.

Personally I don't like fragmenting so many projects/distros its one of the things that hurt our products. Besides, CentOS has already a good name that can only help move ClearOS forward.

If I'm needed I can help with the QA for some packages.

about #4, I think keeping the CentOS filter should remove the distraction of having to do something that has already been done.

PS, don't forget we have an IRC channel in freenode #clearfoundation come say hi! and stay longer than 10mins!

Cheers,
Mike



I agree with all this, as for QA Im always messing with new hardware so I would be more then willing to provide what ever QA I can (as able) for software and/or packages and testing on what ever hardware I have laying around to make sure it can be used in a wide array of different configurations when it comes to hardware and making sure the OS its self remains compatible with as many types of hardware as possible, as im almost constantly switching out hardware to test and play around with with things like this

Just my opinions:-
1) In my view releasing a RHEL6 based ISO provides only a short term gain and as pointed out above duplicates effort for you guys who could be used on better things Agreed it would be nice to draw in community support from the start...and i'd love to get my hands on it

2) Count me in for QA / test etc etc

3) Not me for sure! but the last post from January on the CentOS-devel list suggests that only the QA & testing is left before release? Is it really that far away
lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/...-January/006516.html
www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=25878
wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/6/AuditStatus
I noticed that they have an IRC channel on Freenode that maybe worth a visit #centos-devel

4) Yes worth the distraction if it means you can leverage additional community support and other features prior to the final release. There appear to be several components to familiarise with such as the build system, QA, and how the whole community involvement will work - so perhaps a longer period is beneficial.

No if the team feel that ClearOS6 could be released with community support / apps to follow. This presents a more complete and finished product to develop with
Depending on timescale of course! If it was to take say another 6+months to get to a CentOS6 release, then the effort of 'knocking up' a sanitized RHEL6 build for development is perhaps proprtionately less. If however it was only a couple of months, then I think it would be wasted effort Where's my crystal ball....

P.S your sign up link doesn't seem to work?
"We're sorry, ...@gmail.com does not have permission to access this spreadsheet."

I tried to access the link you posted to offer my any kind of help I could and my credentials prompted the stupid captcha field and you can't even remotely read all the letters. I can't tell if I'm not entering the right letters or if my username or password is wrong. it doesn't work.

spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey...o2NE43NkE5M3M0alE6MQ

I fixed the link above Dirk...try it again please.

K...thanks Dave...I've checked in.

ok, on a side note not sure if I missed something or not but I have been waiting to sign up to help test the 6.0 beta as a beta tester/QA (or what ever) but never saw a thread/link/post on where/how to sign up and I have been wanting to help and dedicate my time as I can to the perfection of the latest version and offer my abilities to test it with various hardware configurations (rangeing from mini car type computers with microdrives up to your full server class systems with ECC RAM and enterprise grade hardware and even throw in Solid state drives and other SSD hardware into the various mixes as I got tones of new and old hardware I want to throw this on to see what works and what we can say the absolute minimum specs are (get a base line if you will), and I really love doing things like this so if there is a way I can still sign up or put my name down to help, please let me know!

Tim Burgess wrote:

I noticed that they have an IRC channel on Freenode that maybe worth a visit #centos-devel


I visit this channel last weekend. They told me that CentOS 6.0 will be released when done and first they will release CentOS 5.6.