Author: 2001mikejordan

There are several very generic mathematical abstractions, which I miss a lot in my daily life. The issue is that those concepts do exist, and I meet them all the time, but I do not know how to refer to them without using a mathematical term, that most people will not understand. So, to celebrate… Read more

In this article we address another topic which appeared in multiple discussions recently. We take a look at the difference between the SRPM and the so called dist-git repository of a package. And why do we indeed prefer the dist-git. How RPM packages work? In simple words RPM packages need three things: archive of the… Read more

Or some ramblings on the difference between the mindset of developers and integration engineers, based on a totally unscientific observation. Some time ago I worked as a Build/CI Engineer in a Java development team. I came there with zero knowledge of the Java ecosystem. I had to learn a lot, including at least three kinds… Read more

(This is a repost of the article I wrote in 2017. I think it is as relevant now as it was then) For any code you write, you need several steps to transform it from a set of text files to a certain release artifact or a running service. You go through these steps manually… Read more

I know people who imagine distribution development as the process of piling up the code in the git repository for 6 months and then building it all in one go at the end of those 6 months, so that it can finally be shipped. This is very far from reality. And it is impossible to… Read more

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Principal Engineer in Red Hat. I was a member of the RHEL 9/CentOS Stream 9 Bootstrap team. Opinions are my own. The chase for “bug-to-bug compatibility” hurts community, hurts RHEL customers and hurts the industry as a whole. The real innovation behind the CentOS Stream is the attempt to change… Read more