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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

lists.centos.org

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Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#82
post #73

From their FAQ [0]: Q4: How will CVEs be handled in CentOS Stream? A: Security issues will be updated in CentOS Stream after they are solved in the current RHEL release. So a "front runner" for bugs but not security issues. [0]: https://centos.org/distro-faq/

It's essentially no different from how things currently are. RedHat releases updates, CentOS group picks those up and builds CentOS packages from them. They usually lag a day or two. They really lagged on the PLATYPUS CPU vulnerability for CentOS 7, because they were dealing with a backlog from the 7.9 bump. Took them several days to get the patches out.

Not true, because the current CO is not a rolling update.

RHEL security fixes for version X.Y may or may not fix security issues for version Z.A on CO, if the are not in sync.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#83
post #69

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight. Shocking, because I'd never imagined they'd kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it's killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I'd thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever. Blindingly obvious,…

It's a money grab, pure and simple. They've (Redhat, let alone IBM) done it before (see below).

What happens in practice with this sort of "rolling release" is users end up patching endlessly in production, which no sane person or organization would ever want to do. This was the exact situation for another Redhat acquisition for years now. JBoss EAP and community editions (wildfly now I suppose), everyone who could moved off of JBoss long ago.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#85
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official CentOS/RHEL is more like Debian Stable. The new CentOS "Stream" sounds like it will be more like Debian Testing.

Debian Stable might be more analogous to CentOS, but they don't do major feature backports like RHEL does, so I find stable is often much too old by the time it's actually released.

Take a look in buster-updates (or any X-updates for older ones).

I guess there are only so many ways to organize a distro.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#86
post #69

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight. Shocking, because I'd never imagined they'd kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it's killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I'd thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever. Blindingly obvious,…

Its time for a new internet rule. If Oracle or IBM buys your vendor, you should be migrating.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#87
post #69

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight. Shocking, because I'd never imagined they'd kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it's killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I'd thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever. Blindingly obvious,…

It's a money grab, pure and simple. They've (Redhat, let alone IBM) done it before (see below). What happens in practice with this sort of "rolling release" is users end up patching endlessly in production, which no sane person or organization would ever want to do. This was the exact situation for another Redhat acquisition for years now. JBoss EAP and community editions (wildfly now I suppose), everyone who could m…

Except IBM thinks that this will convert everyone to RHEL licenses and I'm positive that is not what's going to happen.

Ubuntu is already the default for people with ML pipelines and more and more vendors are targeting Ubuntu first for their software.

CentOS will be effectively dead for a lot of companies starting next year (or 2024). (At least we aren't planning on licensing 10^5 systems on RHEL...). I imagine for those same companies, RHEL isn't far behind it.

What's even worse here is that at least for us there are some things that we pay for RHEL for. If we switch all of our other servers, those RHEL licenses won't be continuing either.

Obvious, but stupid.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#88
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Official CentOS/RHEL is more like Debian Stable. The new CentOS "Stream" sounds like it will be more like Debian Testing.

Debian Stable might be more analogous to CentOS, but they don't do major feature backports like RHEL does, so I find stable is often much too old by the time it's actually released.

On the other hand, CentOS systems tend to last much longer due to the 10-year support cycle. So I often encounter wild specimens that are even older than Debian oldstable.

Right now, I've got a bunch of CentOS 6 servers with 2.6.32 kernels that are freshly out of support this month. I was hoping to replace them with 8, but now I'll probably have to settle for 7. At least I can take consolation in the fact that I haven't been called in to troubleshoot any CentOS 5 servers lately.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a free non-developer, i.e. home version of RHEL without any subscription/registration?

http://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html Disclaimer: not affiliated with Oracle in any way. This is just the closest thing to a plain RHEL8 clone I know of, other than CentOS8.

I work for Oracle on their cloud platform (including reasonably closely with the Oracle Linux team, as my team is responsible for the main platform images).

Speaking entirely for myself, opinions my own, may not reflect my employer etc. etc:

I came in to this job expecting OL to just be a CentOS clone, and not really expecting much from the kernel they ship with it.

It is both a CentOS clone, and a bunch more. Oracle takes the CentOS packages and applies bug fixes etc. that upstream RedHat has failed or refused to apply, so I've actually found OL to suffer from fewer problems than CentOS, and we've even had to apply mitigations for CentOS 6 for stuff we haven't had to do to any other OS we distribute. For entirely selfish reasons, I was really glad to see CentOS 6 go end of life last month.

On top of that the OL team hires a significant number of upstream kernel developers, including the core maintainers for a number of components, like XFS, Xen, and so on, and produces the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (a really curious choice of marketing terminology), that incorporates mainstream bug and security patches, while being closer to mainstream than RHEL/CentOS, and the kernel patches submitted upstream by OL devs.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#90
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL. I thought that Fedora was already serving this role

Not really. RHEL / CentOS is basically a hardened snapshot of Fedora taken every few years, with a few bespoke changes on top. So in that sense you could argue that Fedora is a front-runner for "the next RHEL" but at any point in time it is too far ahead of the current RHEL to be a useful testbed in any respect for those users. Although I guess you could argue that it helps knock down bugs in packages like GNOME that…

Yes, this is exactly it. The conspiracy theories about buying-CentOS-to-kill it are understandable but totally off-base. Red Hat brought CentOS in-house at a time when the company was trying to grow from being a single-product company to a portfolio one, and it became clear that Fedora wasn't working for what at the time RH called "layered products". The hope was that CentOS would provide a more-RHEL-like community place for work like RDO to happen. That was partially successful, but the plan wasn't really realized — and speaking from a Fedora point of view, that "Fedora is failing at a thing we need so we'll turn to CentOS" wasn't a healthy dynamic for either project. CentOS Stream serves the initial purpose better, and now RH's distro ecosystem story is actually linear rather than a crazy MC Escher contortion.
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