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by chrisseaton 2712 days ago
> It is the upstream vendor that issues fixes.

So if you have a bug in a RedHat package, and you're paying $100k a year RedHat support contract, all they really do is open a GH issue with the upstream to ask them to fix it? And then you just wait hoping they fix it so RedHat can cherry pick it?

2 comments

We don't know. I'm going to tell you a short story, though.

Rumor has it that KMS[1] was developed entirely because a deep-pocketed RH customer was annoyed that their workstations showed a fraction of a second of the boot/init log, and wanted a more seamlessly-graphical boot.

This feature was not universally welcomed by the kernel community. It excluded BSD cousins and frustrated nVidia and AMD/ATI. I remember standing next to the DRM/KMS maintainer while Linus yelled at us.

RH absolutely will interact with upstream on behalf of their customers. They don't just "open a GH issue"; they present designs, code, rationale, and evidence to upstream. I wonder whether this is something that Oracle does, but it doesn't sound like it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager#Kerne...

Backporting fixes (and fixes ONLY, not new features, and new bugs, with new incompatabilities) onto an older version of software that comes in RHEL is not trivial.