 | | | Subject: Looking for license donations | Subject: Looking for license donations 2007-05-05 - By Axel Thimm
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Hi,
based on Red Hat's kind initiative on offering RHEL licenses three
years ago ATrpms has been building packages for RHEL3/4/5 on
i386/x86_64/ppc since (special thanks go to Chris Kloiber and Greg
Dekoenigsberg for making that happen), and have become a major 3rd
party package repository in the RHEL and clones community.
What was once a two-platform support on one distro has grown into 3
distros on three platforms increasing the number of licenses used for
pulling base packages and updates to build packages against.
This must also have made it increasingly difficult for people inside
Red Hat to justify licensing for ATrpms' builders, so that there had
been some "outages" in the past where no new updates could be built
against due to expired, not-renewed licenses (thankfully these update
outages were short and not kernel update happened during that time).
This is less a problem with RHEL compared to say Fedora due to the
very stable ABI, but especially in situations with kernel (security)
errata which imply rebuilds of all kmdls it is very painful to both
the repo maintainer and the users.
Five of the 10 currently used licenses will expire in less than ten
days and all attempts to renew them have not worked out until now (the
other five will expire by December). There are several paths that
ATrpms can take:
o Find someone to donate RHEL licenses
o Reduce the number of required licenses by dropping platforms.
ppc has not been the greatest hit judging from the download
statistics, so it could probably be canceled
o Reduce the number of required licenses by dropping distros.
RHEL3 has seen its glory days pass by as well.
o Switch from using RHEL to using CentOS/SL.
Until now ATrpms could claim to be safe from any possible rebuild
bugs, while CentOS/SL make a great job in reproducing the API/ABI of
RHEL there is always a small possibility to miss something.
o A mix of the above
I'd prefer to keep building against RHEL, e.g. to continue to utilize
the set of 10 licenses, that's why there's this cry for help.
--
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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