Dear CentOS Enthusiasts,

Here's what's happening in our community over the past month.

CentOS Stream 9 is open for contribution: Container images and a note about new composes

We've been working on producing more artifacts for CentOS Stream 9, those can be found at the composes location: https://composes.stream.centos.org

You'll notice a few directories under there, we recommend folks who have been consuming CentOS Stream 9 to use the composes under the 'production/' directory. Composes in the production directory are what we'll eventually use to publish to the mirrors

Here's a short description of each compose type:

- Test composes: run ad-hoc against content that may not have made it through testing/RHEL gating yet

- Development composes: run regularly (goal of 1 per day) against gated content

- Production composes: run regularly (goal of 1 per day) against gated content and are candidates for promoting to the mirrors

Container images are regularly produced from the Development composes, you can find those at quay.io/centos/centos:stream9-development

We are also refining our quickstart contribution guide: https://docs.centos.org/en-US/stream-contrib/quickstart/

The CentOS Stream 9 repos have been open for a few months now, but this captures the process if you'd like to participate and make change. File a
bugzilla, and happy patching!

What you can expect for the rest of the quarter:

- Cloud images are coming in the next month or so
- Signed packages are coming in the next month or so
- Publishing to the mirrors will happen later this quarter

If you have any questions, direct these to Brian Stinson, or the centos-devel mailing list.

New Board Members

We're very pleased to announce that the CentOS Board of Directors welcomed two new members in our June board meeting, and they will join us for the first time in the July meeting.

The new directors are Josh Boyer and Davide Cavalca, both of whom have been around the CentOS community for a long time.

Josh is a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, and works on the team that produces RHEL. Davide is a Production Engineer at Facebook, and has spoken many times at various CentOS Dojos around the world about his work with CentOS at Facebook.

We hope you'll join us in welcoming them, and we look forward to their participation in the governance of our project in the coming years.

Over the coming week or two, I hope to have some interviews with them, so you can get a deeper look into why they've agreed to be on the board, and what their vision is for the coming years.

CVEs in CentOS Stream

Over the past few months, we've seen some confusion in the community regarding how CVEs are handled in CentOS Stream. Red Hat engineer Carl George wrote a detailed post to the centos-devel mailing list last week, using libxml2 as an example, to talk about how they actually work.

You can read that post in the mailing list archive if you're not subscribed to the list.

The short story is that if a CVE is not part of a security embargo, it goes into CentOS Stream with regular updates, but if it is, it'll hit RHEL first. (That's not Red Hat or CentOS policy, but, rather, the policy of the CVE registry itself, so that's the behavior you'll see on any open source project.) But Carl goes into it in much more detail, so you'll want to read the full write-up.

IRC Move

We wanted to update you on the changes to our IRC presence. A few weeks ago, there were some changes to the management of the Freenode IRC network that resulted in a large number of the operator staff leaving and forming a new IRC network, Libera.chat. We decided, at that time, to follow them, in order to stick with the staff and policies that we have been familiar with for the past more than ten years.

Further developments since then, including the removal of many popular channels, including all of the CentOS channels, have demonstrated that we made the right call, and we appreciate John's ("Bahhumbug") leadership in this decision.

All of the former channels that were on freenode are now on Libera.chat, and with the help of the operator staff, we have restored the channel ops, permissions and roles.

A huge thank you goes out to Dave "bigpresh" Precious and all of the Libera.chat staff for their professionalism and assistance during this disruptive transition.

We encourage you to join us on #centos on the irc.Libera.chat network. Our other channels, along with instructions for joining and registering your IRC name, are on the CentOS website.

SIG Reports

This month, we hear from two of our SIGs - both of which are relatively new. The kmods SIG published their first quarterly report to the CentOS Blog, as did the Hyperscale SIG. The kmods SIG was approved during the June Board of Directors meeting.

We're particularly excited about the Hyperscale SIG's work on producing live DVD images. If you're interested in the wider availability of live DVD images for CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream, we encourage you to talk to the people on the Hyperscale SIG.