CentOS Community Newsletter, March 2021 (#2103)

Dear CentOS Community,

Here's a glimpse into what's happening in the CentOS community, and what's coming in the next few months.

[root@centos ~]# dnf swap centos-linux-repos centos-stream-repos
[root@centos ~]# dnf distro-sync

Carl George has provided a short screencast to demonstrate the process.

- The Stream 9 buildsystem is coming along, one architecture (s390x) is having hardware wired in very shortly

• initscripts: incompatibility with grep 3.2+
• dnf: incorrect install-n, localinstall, autoremove-n, remove-n, repoquery-n, list-updateinfo behavior
• rpm: enable ndb
• Add pcre2-tools package to CodeReady Builder repository
• Transfer via socat fails with openssl enabled
• Please upgrade CMake to 3.17+ and include newly updated macros from Fedora
• Please upgrade the non-modular CMake package instead of releasing this module
• cmake: Sync Fedora macros for optional support for out-of-source builds

We appreciate your patience as we improve the contribution process, as well as the reporting around it.

DevConf.cz

The annual developers conference that is usually held in Brno, Czechia, was held online in February. The CentOS Project was featured in two presentations there.

Davide Cavalca presented on the use of CentOS Stream at Facebook.

And Brian Stinson, Tomas Tomecek, and Carl George presented on Consuming CentOS Stream.

We expect video from both of those presentations to be available within the next couple of weeks.

Special Interest Groups

Special interest groups (SIGs) are the place where communities build things on top of CentOS - whether this is software, such as the Cloud SIG or the Storage SIG, or a non-software effort, such as the Promo SIG or Artwork SIG.

SIGs are asked to report quarterly on their progress, so that you know what they're up to, and where you can get involved. We also encourage you to attend the SIG's meetings, where you can find out about the day-to-day work.

CentOS OpsTools SIG Quarterly Report

Purpose

Provide tools and documentation, recommendation and best practices for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

Sadly, we did not attract new volunteers to contribute to the SIGs purposes, but at the same time, we didn't lose any.

Activity

After initial euphoria setting up the SIG and getting to work, we can now observe a kind of settlement. For the next quarter, we are planning to upgrade collectd to version 5.12.

There is also an interest in investigating in loki as tool to allow multi-tenant log aggregation.

Issues for the board

Nothing to report.

Infrastructure SIG report

DONE

* Updated SIG wiki
* Updated meeting calendar - Infra SIG will meet every 2nd Monday @ 1500 UTC on #centos-meeting. Next meeting is scheduled on 1st March
* Added x2 new members giving limited access to core infrastructure machines for CentOS Stream that CentOS Infrastructure is assisting in bootstrapping.
* * Leonardo Rossetti & Mohan Boddu. Both are senior engineers at Red Hat and are heavily involved in the development of release engineering and compose building for the upcoming C9S release.
* Completed a full infrastructure-wide upgrade of the monitoring stack to latest version of Zabbix

IN PROGRESS

* Review ticket for mbox koji access
* Review ticket for registering domain name in AU
* Account merge to Fedora account auth system Noggin

TODO

* Develop criteria for infrastructure access
* Admin, there can always be more tidying and refinement on admin 🙂

Governance Documentation

Over the years, the CentOS Governance has been documented in a handful of web pages and blog posts, which has served the purpose. With greater scrutiny on our governance, we are discovering that there are assumptions and "common knowledge" which is not documented anywhere.

As a consumer community (ie, we make stuff, you use it), the governance model was perceived to be less important to clarify before now. This has resulted in some unforeseen problems and misunderstandings over the past few months. Over the coming months we are trying to address this in two ways.

We plan to take the existing governance documents, and consolidate them into more formal project bylaws.

But, also, in this process, we are asking for community input on the governance model, to identify areas where we can improve. We are already implementing more openness around the Board of Directors process, and this is just the start. By telling us how the CentOS governance could better serve you, you can help us make this step towards being a more inclusive, collaborative project.

As we move towards a more contributor model, it becomes more important to clearly document how the project governs itself, and how you are part of that model. We hope that you'll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming months. We also hope that you will engage in this process and help us continue to make the project more transparent and collaborative.

Rebuild News

As various RHEL rebuild projects start up, we're very aware that we're all part of the same family. We look forward to collaborating in any ways that make sense. And, regardless of how (or if) we end up working together, we wish these projects the best of luck and success.

The Rocky Linux project is sending out monthly community updates. The latest edition can be seen here.

And the Alma Linux project has just announced the release candidate (R.C.) for their 8.3 release.

Note: We've highlighted two rebuild projects here, but we're not trying to pick favorites. We're just mentioning the ones that have been brought to our attention. If you're running a RHEL rebuild project, and want us to link to your news in future newsletters, please get in touch with Rich, at rbowen@centosproject.org, or join us on the centos-promo mailing list.

Other Community News

If you have any community news, big or small, please do let us know, on the centos-promo list.

The Foreman Project tweeted about a presentation around managing CentOS Stream hosts:

Community member @lzap created this great tutorial that demonstrates how with Foreman you can manage Centos Stream hosts. Foreman helps you better control continuous delivery for #CentOSStream: https://t.co/h6XdpAQjFY

— Foreman (@ForemanProject) February 1, 2021

Phil wrote this excellent article about the merits of CentOS Stream. We think it's worth your time to read. https://medium.com/swlh/centos-stream-why-its-awesome-5c45d944fb22

Get Involved

In addition to the usual avenues for getting involved in The CentOS Project, I would like to draw attention to two specific opportunities.

First, this newsletter: If you would like to be involved in the process of putting this together each month, come join us on the centos-promo mailing list. We start drafting the next month's newsletter as soon as the last one "goes to press", and the more help we can get, the broader vision of the community we can present.

Second, after the recent CentOS Dojo, we committed to doing a quarterly online Dojo until such time as we can travel again (and possibly after that!). We need help in finding and scheduling the content, and promoting the event. Again, fo rthis, join us on the centos-promo mailing list, where that work will be happening.

Get Gear

If you want to proclaim your love for the CentOS Project, we have two main options for obtaining CentOS Gear. Head over to the Red Hat Cool Stuff Store for CentOS shirts and hats. And HelloTux has CentOS tshirts, polo shirts, and sweatshirts!

Until next time ...

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for being part of the CentOS community!