Comment by netzvieh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netzvieh | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones?

Red Hat publishes it's sources on https://git.centos.org. Those are then used to build CentOS Linux packages.

In the future they'll do their development there, and build CentOS Stream and Red Hat Packages from there.

See also: https://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-...

> Remember, the source code at git.centos.org is basically read only, downstream code from RHEL. That’s how Red Hat complies with the GPL. Technically we go above and beyond because we are only legally required to provide code to customers, and not required to provide code for BSD/Apache/etc licensed code, only attribution.

Regarding question 2, CentOS has a somewhat custom build system for each major version afaik, for 8 this would be https://koji.mbox.centos.org/koji/

> Red Hat publishes it's sources on https://git.centos.org. Those are then used to build CentOS Linux packages.

Have you checked if this repo actually works as intended? Because I was wondering if the git repo has RHEL or CentOS sources (or both). So I tried to find out myself instead of just throwing the question out there. It went roughly as follows:

- Let me check the sources of dracut (the RHEL installer) in https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut. Files: empty, Commits: empty, Forks: empty, Branches and Releases: judging by the names they seem to be CentOS, not RHEL sources. And they're using git.centos.org just as a code dump, not for development. Fair.

- Let's see the actual code.

  git clone https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut.git
  Cloning into 'dracut'...
  remote: Counting objects: 1673, done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1632/1632), done.
  remote: Total 1673 (delta 82), reused 1446 (delta 0)
  Receiving objects: 100% (1673/1673), 1.60 MiB | 2.08 MiB/s, done.
  Resolving deltas: 100% (82/82), done.
  warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

??? There's nothing there.

- Back to the web interface, https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut/tree/c8 Reading .dracut.metadata, I guess the source is in SOURCES/dracut-049.tar.xz. But browsing the directory https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut/blob/c8/f/SOURCES lists only patches, not the presumed source dracut-049.tar.xz

- Maybe it's under Releases? Let's check imports/c8/dracut-049-95.git20200804.el8 Clicking the source tree gets me back to the SOURCES dir with only patches, not good. Maybe the floppy-save button? https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut/archive/imports/c8/dracut... -> 404-Not-Found. https://git.centos.org/rpms/dracut/archive/imports/c8/dracut... -> 404-Not-Found.

I'm not a professional dev, maybe I just don't understand. But is there a way to actually see/browse/download the dracut source code from CentOS 8.3 (let alone RHEL 8.3) from git.centos.org?

The git repository stores only the packaging related items (the specfile, the custom patches, etc.). The actual source is stored as a binary artifact that is downloaded by a `get_sources.sh` script.

The build process is documented here: https://wiki.centos.org/action/show/Sources?action=show&redi...

That did it, thanks. From a cursory glance, it looks like it fetches indeed the RHEL (rather than CentOS) sources. It looks like the mains questions for the clone builders will be how RH is going to provide RHEL code drops for their point releases (and updates) in the future. Since right now there are separate 8 and Stream branches, but presumably the 8 will be discontinued at some point?

The RPM SPEC file in that repo will have a pointer to the actual upstream sources for the package. This is a typical scenario -- they are not re-hosting all of the sources to build a Linux distro, just the build steps needed to pull, patch, and build upstream sources.

So where do I actually get this upstream (RHEL8) source of say dracut? Because I was reacting to the comment "Red Hat publishes it's sources on https://git.centos.org. Those are then used to build CentOS Linux packages."

Seems that dracut upstream is hosted at kernel.org.

This is the regex used in the watch file for Debian to fetch new upstream tarballs: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/dracut/dracut-([\...

rpmbuild will download the sources listed in the spec file, apply the patches, and execute the build instructions to produce RPM and SRPM packages. The SRPM will contain the "as built" source tree.

For dracut, the spec file defines the source as http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/dracut/dracut-049...

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