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.

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’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.

I’m still getting downvoted, so I’m just going to put this here and be done with this:

RTFM about DevOps

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Linux distribution timeline

I like Gnome the best too. In my experience, it’s the desktop environment that focuses the most on making sure that no little bugs slip in. Like normally when you’re using a desktop environment, it will be good except for a few bugs here and there where you have to remember weird things like not backing out of the settings menu in a certain way in order to not trigger a bug. Gnome seems to have the least amount of weird little bugs like that.

It’s not very configurable out of the box, but I prefer that too. I’m getting a bit old and set in my ways, and don’t really want to mess around with too much configuration anymore.