CentOS product definition (draft)

This is still a draft !

Rationale

The CentOS project is pleased to see that integrators use CentOS as the base platform to build on. We define here what a genuine CentOS consists of, and specify when you may properly call the product "CentOS", rather than sone lesser designation, such as 'based on CentOS'

Some integrators feel a need to modify the base platform to fit their design, and encourage this. In some cases the integration modifies the base platform in such a way that functionality that the core CentOS team consider so substantial that part of the core of CentOS is missing.

This is worrisome, since those modifications can make it needlessly hard or even impossible to help the CentOS users on our support forums. We may inadvertently undoing part of what the integrator considers a necessary change which (from the viewpoint of the integrator) may be considered as 'breaking' their product.

We list here the basic functionality and packages that we consider essential if you want to call your product "CentOS" or "based on CentOS".

RPH: I think a mixed 'functional' and 'essential' package list is needed, rather than a complete Dependency tree enumeration, makes sense, as we avoid maintenance load on this page -- see http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/BrokenVserver

RPH needs to continue edit below here

Requirements

In order to call your product "CentOS" or "based on CentOS" (or anything that relates the product to CentOS), we ask you to fulfill the following items

• Provide the official yum packages and yum functionality so users can install packages and update packages from the official repositories without any errors, at all times
• Provide the official CentOS packages for at least the following list package:
• .. specific packages, so long as the functional yum update

• Package all add-on files in (minimally yum friendly, optionally apt enabled) archives in separate yum-repo.conf files, which reside in /etc/yum.repo.d/

• Additional RPM packages (and related SRPMS) that are provided by the system builder should be signed with a GnuPG signing key, published in the MIT keyserver network.
• (please provide more info)

Recommended

Consider following list of design recommendations

RPH We CAN enforce terms of use of the CentOS mark, and it is idle to suggest otherwise; definition of _what_ we are protecting is the question here

• Ship the official CentOS kernel version, and supply needed additional modules in a form friendly to the stable kernel API, using /lib/modules/(kernel-version/updates/ DISCUSS

• Try as much as you can to not deviate from library incompatibilities so add-on repositories keep on working DISCUSS -- NO not a centos goal
• (please provide more info)

CentOS name

We do not explain rationale here as it is out of scope.