this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I haven't been really keeping up with this RHEL drama, so I'm probably going to regret making this comment. But about this bug merge request in particular, you have to remember that RHEL's main target audience is paying enterprise customers. It's the "E" right there in RHEL. So stability is a high priority for their developers, since if they accidentally introduce a bug to their code, then they'll have a lot of unhappy paying customers.
The next comment that was cropped out of that screenshot basically explains exactly that. While the Red Hat developers probably appreciate the bug fix, the reality is that the bug was listed as non-critical, and the Red Hat teams didn't have the capacity to adequately regression test and QA the merge request. But the patch was successfully merged into Fedora, so it will eventually end up in RHEL through that path, which is exactly what the Fedora path is for.
The blowup about this particulat bug doesn't seem justified to me. Red Hat obviously can't fix and regression test every single bug that's listed in their bug tracker. So why arbitrarily focus on this one medium priority bug? if it were listed as a critical bug, then yes, the blowup would be justified.
In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn't care. They just don't want community contributions.
CentOS Stream is the staging ground for RHEL. It isn't a bleeding edge distro that can accept any merge request willy-nilly. For the reason why, reread my original comment about the nature of enterprise support.
Fedora is the distro that is more bleeding edge in the RHEL realm. This merge request was more suited for Fedora, and the fix was successfully applied to Fedora. So, I fail to see any irrational actions from Red Hat here.
Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn't be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don't want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can't decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying "it is already decided" "Fedora is doomed" etc.
I stopped recommending it. It is a pity, but there are alternatives
Why would they accept PR at all if they don't have a robust testing process and approvals are dictated by customers needs?
The message as it is now to potential contributors is that their contribution in not welcome, unless it's free labor that financially benefits only ibm.
Which is fair, but the message itself is a new PR issue for red hat
They do have a robust testing process, but their main focus at the CentOS Stream stage is more about preparing for the stable RHEL build than it is about adding a ton of new features and bug fixes. Testing takes time so it would be physically impossible for them to test everything if they didn't have a limit on the type of contributions they accept. For bug fixes, their limit is that the bug has to be critical. For bugs lesser than that, the correct place to contribute those fixes is in Fedora.
That has been adequately explained in the merge request at this point, if you click in that link at the top of this thread amd read through it to get the latest info. The Red Hat devs have also made no indication that they're not welcome to contributors. Anyone who's saying that is blowing this merge request issue out of proportion.
I read it, and I read the messages from the devs. The communication issue I am trying to point is also highlighted in the comments: if the decision on merging a PR is uniquely dictated by financial benefits of IBM, ignoring the broader benefits of the community, the message is that red hat is looking for free labor and it is not really interested in anything else. Which is absolutely the case, as we all know, but writing it down after the recent events is another PR issue, as red hat justified controversial decisions on the lack of contributions from downstream.
The Italian dev tried to put it down as "we have to follow our service management processes that are messy, tedious and expensive" but he didn't address the problems in the original message. The contributor himself felt like they asked his contribution just to reject it because of purely financial reasons without any additional details. It is a new PR incident
I don't know what to tell you. This change was more appropriate for Fedora and developers are bad at PR is basically the simplest way to put it.
Not having resources to test it right this second isn't "doesn't care" it's just a lower priority.
Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.
CentOS Stream is midstream of RHEL and Fedora. That sounds like it's like a cert type of environment for RHEL. The same logic would apply there. You don't want to be introducing a bunch of new changes to code once it's in the cert environment unless they're critical.
But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don't engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I'm not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
All the control and all of the money.
Besides that, I suspect they have no clear vision. And if they do, they are absolutely terrible at communicating that.
I'm making no comment on CentOS being absorbed and repurposed by Red Hat. I'm just saying it makes sense why Red Hat would rather have this fix in Fedora than CentOS Stream.
I'm making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I'm just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
I'm getting downvoted on my comment about not making a comment on CentOS, so now I feel obligated to reply to this.
I don't know, dude. I don't really care about the miscommunication. I was just focusing solely on the merits of the merge request's code changes.
For the miscommunication, it seems like a two way street to me. That was GitLab, so the Red Hat dev was probably operating under the assumption that people there already understood everything about their testing process. But obviously that's not the case, so Red Hat should create better boilerplate responses for these scenarios. But on the other side of the coin, whoever took this screenshot and posted it to reddit or wherever did so prematurely, imo. They should've asked around a bit to make sure it was a legitimate thing to blow up about before they sent a lynch mob to the merge request.
I'm still getting downvoted, so I'm just going to put this here and be done with this:
RTFM about DevOps
I don't think so, you are probably getting downvoted because you said exactly this:
And seems somehow offended that I replied to this statement trying to explain (not necessarily justify)
I'm getting downvoted because I'm not conceding that the miscommunication was a legitimate excuse for that blowup. And I'm going to continue to not concede that. I found this whole situation to be embarrassing, and I think instead of getting mad at the miscommunication, you should all be getting mad at the moron who took that screenshot and whipped up the mob frenzy to swarm that merge request, because ultimately Red Hat was 100% justified in not accepting that merge request, and it made you all look like morons.
It's fine to get mad on social media, but if you're contributing to GitLab or someplace else, then you need to slow your roll. There's always a process involved when contributing to a project, and you have to learn that process in order to contribute effectively. You can't blow up and whip up a social media frenzy at the slightest inconvenience.
Edit: Sorry, @[email protected]. I should also add that I'm not mad at you personally or anything, or calling you a moron. I'm more talking about the collective response to this situation. And I'm pretty bad at words, so I feel like I accidentally made it too angry.
That could have been better communicated though. What you said is reasonable, what Michal said isn't as much.
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That's been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
The Apparently is already patch on fedora... Just reporting other comments in this thread. But why do they accept contribution to centos of they don't want patches that are not economically beneficial to the company? It is a pretty bad message written as this
It will get to CentOS through Fedora. Always patch as far upstream as you can.
Agree on point of detail, but the "drama" is the reason for the fuss. Redhat's communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it's been apalling. As others have pointed out, they've insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it's not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat's poor decision making, and that's a shame for all of us.
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with CentOS Stream and its purpose.