10 ms·

Building CentOS 8

174 points by rbjorklin 7y ago

elagost 7y ago
Timelines are always fascinating for me to see, given the massive amount of effort that goes into building something like this. Even though it's essentially a "it'll be ready when it's ready" post, and we obviously know CentOS 8 will be released at some point, I'm still very excited about it. Thanks for all your hard work! If anyone working on this is hanging around here, are there any particular challenges that are unique this time around? The init system not changing again must be quite nice, as mentioned in the post.
techntoke 7y ago
Typical Red Hat... takes over CentOS and now they are going to take their sweet time to update it and we'll end up with a bunch of EL distros again because Red Hat can't automate anything. It really should be built the same day as RHEL. I don't know anyone who uses RHEL anymore though because they are so antiquated.
- type0 7y ago
  Opensuse and suse do their work almost in sync, now that is so fluent that you could convert existing opensuse install into SLES. I just can't understand why RH don't wan't more customers coming from CentOS.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    You can convert RHEL<->CentOS just like that, too. Edit to clarify: RHEL and CentOS are binary/ABI compatible to the point where you can switch repositories, overwrite a couple key packages, and now you have the other system.
    - techntoke 7y ago
      So much so that it will take them weeks, if not months, to build it.
      - gtirloni 7y ago
        Converting "existing opensuse install" means converting a server from CentOS to RHEL. That is done in minutes. Getting the source code for RHEL, making the necessary modifications and releasing it as CentOS is a whole different thing.
        techntoke 7y ago
        How is it different? It is literally compiling a bunch of packages and creating an ISO or install method. You can do this yourself and store the packages in a searchable repo like most other Linux distros. Void was created and is well maintained by very few people, and so was Alpine when it started. With a little automation this should have been done at the same time RHEL was released.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        gerdesas 7y ago
        It's easy to whine; it's far harder to do. If it weren't you'd whine less and do more.
        techntoke 7y ago
        I do plenty. I contribute to many packages for other Linux distros. Yes it is hard with RHEL cause their package manager is still really terrible. Checkout Arch and Alpine though, or Void for good package management.
        gerdesas 7y ago
        It's a package manager. It works the same as all other package managers. Could you, perhaps, come up with a legitimate argument instead of your poor attempt at trolling?
        7y ago
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- heybrendan 7y ago
  The last part of your comment seems quite absurd. Simply put, just because you may not know of anyone in your immediate professional or social circles using RHEL, does not mean it's not extremely popular in the capital E enterprise. AFAICT, RHEL is the Linux distribution of choice in most enterprise IT organizations /because/ of it's commitment to long-term support, stability, ABI compatibility, programs like EUS, and so forth--the list goes on.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    All the very large enterprises I've worked for were so happy to move away from RHEL due to being cumbersome, old, and poor quality.
- freedomben 7y ago
  CentOS took weeks last time for Cent 7, and also Cent 6. Nothing has changed since Red Hat took over. Also, I do find your lack of respect and gratitude for Red Hat for releasing all their stuff fully open source and allowing projects like CentOS to flourish despite the cannibalization quite distasteful. Not that you care what I think, but it definitely smacks of entitlement mentality.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    Lack of respect is RHEL itself. Linux is doing just fine without it and flourishing. They are just a sales organization selling something old and dying to make a little more profit. RHEL is like the VMware of Linux distros.
mlosapio 7y ago
Thank you to the project maintainers; while RedHat does release the source code anyone who’s actually compiled from source knows that it’s never push-button easy
bluedino 7y ago
Another group of unsung heroes are the people who do the repos like Remi and EPEL
temac 7y ago
Fascinating to see the amount of uncoordinated (with RHEL) effort going into that, despite Red Hat now basically owning CentOS and employing the main devs.
- xiaq 7y ago
  This really puzzles me too. If I understand correctly, basically what CentOS does is taking the source code of RHEL, debranding it, and rebuilding it? Now that CentOS is officially affiliated with RH, why isn't RH just starting with with a placeholder brand in the source code (like "$BRAND$", or something more sophisticated to avoid conflict with all programming languages), and substitute the brand for "RHEL" to make RHEL, and for "CentOS" to make CentOS?
  - h1d 7y ago
    Why doesn't RH just rebrand CentOS as RH while keeping RHEL for enterprise customers to increase brand recognition? People also feel more "official" too.
    - oso2k 7y ago
      Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting Officially, Fedora & Fedora Server are the upstream for RHEL Workstation and RHEL, respectively.
      - h1d 7y ago
        I see that but upstream means bleeding edge which is not exactly what CentOS users are looking for and if there was something like RH "community edition" which is essentially CentOS (with RH logo) that gets released with a fixed schedule after RHEL (instead of after somewhat random moment for CentOS), it can make people more comfortable instead of relying on the current community to make sure to get their debranding and releasing of CentOS right. And also it may be easier for people to upgrade to RHEL if RH provides an official way from such "community edition". People like and want the stability of RHEL and relying on the community to get started with RHEL-like distro could be a concern. If you embrace the existance of CentOS, why not do that fully as part of RH family?
broknbottle 7y ago
can't they just use sed to replace Red Hat with CentOS ;) :D
- mrbill 7y ago
  From the page: "No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"
  - xref 7y ago
    Crazy, his exact question was answered in the post. It’s almost like scoring a perfect 0/100 on a multiple choice test...
  - lightdot 7y ago
    Tap once or twice on your sarcasm detector and see if it's running. It might just need calibration since it didn't pick up the tone of the message or the emoticons. In the worst case, a complete overhaul might be required. You might want to test it on this message and note the result. Here are some emoticons to complete the test: ;) :) :D
freedomben 7y ago
This is cool. I remember going through this exact thing when RHEL 7 got released. It was many weeks before CentOS 7 was ready, and then a little longer still before Digital Ocean and other providers had images available. It can be hard to wait, but it's worth it. Looking forward to CentOS 8! Oh, also worth saying that if you create a Red Hat developer account they will give you a free copy of RHEL to test with. If you're planning to deploy CentOS 8 and want to test now, that can be a good way to get going before the CentOS 8 release. Also, thank you Red Hat! You guys are amazing. The entire world has benefited from your work. I've been a happy Fedora user for many years, and I deeply appreciate how you've made my life better. Thank you for building an amazing set of distros, and thank you for pushing forward many of the huge projects that improve our lives such as Gnome and many more. Thank you for your commitment to open source and for living your values. You are heroes to me :-)
- techntoke 7y ago
  Definitely not worth it if you want to utilize the benefits of updated software. I encourage everyone to switch to Ubuntu or another Linux distro over RHEL... You'll never look back.
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    Sometimes stability trumps up-to-dated-ness. I know I can run yum update without breaking the system.
chousuke 7y ago
I've been playing around with RHEL 8 a bit at work. I like the direction. Definitely looking forward to CentOS 8. Work on eradicating old stuff continues. The "system python" setup also feels like an inspired choice which should make it easier to deploy python stuff on top of RHEL 8 With RHEL 7, trying to install newer versions of software via SCLs (in cases where it's advisable) never felt like they were well-integrated. The new module system seems extremely promising; fewer people will have a reason to use eg. Ubuntu if RHEL provides the new stuff via modules. Other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much that would surprise people who are already familiar with RHEL 7.

174 points by rbjorklin 7y ago

Timelines are always fascinating for me to see, given the massive amount of effort that goes into building something like this. Even though it's essentially a "it'll be ready when it's ready" post, and we obviously know CentOS 8 will be released at some point, I'm still very excited about it. Thanks for all your hard work! If anyone working on this is hanging around here, are there any particular challenges that are unique this time around? The init system not changing again must be quite nice, as mentioned in the post.

techntoke 7y ago

Typical Red Hat... takes over CentOS and now they are going to take their sweet time to update it and we'll end up with a bunch of EL distros again because Red Hat can't automate anything. It really should be built the same day as RHEL. I don't know anyone who uses RHEL anymore though because they are so antiquated.

type0 7y ago
Opensuse and suse do their work almost in sync, now that is so fluent that you could convert existing opensuse install into SLES. I just can't understand why RH don't wan't more customers coming from CentOS.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  You can convert RHEL<->CentOS just like that, too. Edit to clarify: RHEL and CentOS are binary/ABI compatible to the point where you can switch repositories, overwrite a couple key packages, and now you have the other system.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    So much so that it will take them weeks, if not months, to build it.
    - gtirloni 7y ago
      Converting "existing opensuse install" means converting a server from CentOS to RHEL. That is done in minutes. Getting the source code for RHEL, making the necessary modifications and releasing it as CentOS is a whole different thing.
      - techntoke 7y ago
        How is it different? It is literally compiling a bunch of packages and creating an ISO or install method. You can do this yourself and store the packages in a searchable repo like most other Linux distros. Void was created and is well maintained by very few people, and so was Alpine when it started. With a little automation this should have been done at the same time RHEL was released.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        gerdesas 7y ago
        It's easy to whine; it's far harder to do. If it weren't you'd whine less and do more.
        techntoke 7y ago
        I do plenty. I contribute to many packages for other Linux distros. Yes it is hard with RHEL cause their package manager is still really terrible. Checkout Arch and Alpine though, or Void for good package management.
        gerdesas 7y ago
        It's a package manager. It works the same as all other package managers. Could you, perhaps, come up with a legitimate argument instead of your poor attempt at trolling?
        7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
heybrendan 7y ago
The last part of your comment seems quite absurd. Simply put, just because you may not know of anyone in your immediate professional or social circles using RHEL, does not mean it's not extremely popular in the capital E enterprise. AFAICT, RHEL is the Linux distribution of choice in most enterprise IT organizations /because/ of it's commitment to long-term support, stability, ABI compatibility, programs like EUS, and so forth--the list goes on.
- techntoke 7y ago
  All the very large enterprises I've worked for were so happy to move away from RHEL due to being cumbersome, old, and poor quality.
freedomben 7y ago
CentOS took weeks last time for Cent 7, and also Cent 6. Nothing has changed since Red Hat took over. Also, I do find your lack of respect and gratitude for Red Hat for releasing all their stuff fully open source and allowing projects like CentOS to flourish despite the cannibalization quite distasteful. Not that you care what I think, but it definitely smacks of entitlement mentality.
- techntoke 7y ago
  Lack of respect is RHEL itself. Linux is doing just fine without it and flourishing. They are just a sales organization selling something old and dying to make a little more profit. RHEL is like the VMware of Linux distros.

mlosapio 7y ago

Thank you to the project maintainers; while RedHat does release the source code anyone who’s actually compiled from source knows that it’s never push-button easy

bluedino 7y ago

Another group of unsung heroes are the people who do the repos like Remi and EPEL

temac 7y ago

Fascinating to see the amount of uncoordinated (with RHEL) effort going into that, despite Red Hat now basically owning CentOS and employing the main devs.

xiaq 7y ago
This really puzzles me too. If I understand correctly, basically what CentOS does is taking the source code of RHEL, debranding it, and rebuilding it? Now that CentOS is officially affiliated with RH, why isn't RH just starting with with a placeholder brand in the source code (like "$BRAND$", or something more sophisticated to avoid conflict with all programming languages), and substitute the brand for "RHEL" to make RHEL, and for "CentOS" to make CentOS?
- h1d 7y ago
  Why doesn't RH just rebrand CentOS as RH while keeping RHEL for enterprise customers to increase brand recognition? People also feel more "official" too.
  - oso2k 7y ago
    Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting Officially, Fedora & Fedora Server are the upstream for RHEL Workstation and RHEL, respectively.
    - h1d 7y ago
      I see that but upstream means bleeding edge which is not exactly what CentOS users are looking for and if there was something like RH "community edition" which is essentially CentOS (with RH logo) that gets released with a fixed schedule after RHEL (instead of after somewhat random moment for CentOS), it can make people more comfortable instead of relying on the current community to make sure to get their debranding and releasing of CentOS right. And also it may be easier for people to upgrade to RHEL if RH provides an official way from such "community edition". People like and want the stability of RHEL and relying on the community to get started with RHEL-like distro could be a concern. If you embrace the existance of CentOS, why not do that fully as part of RH family?

broknbottle 7y ago

can't they just use sed to replace Red Hat with CentOS ;) :D

mrbill 7y ago
From the page: "No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"
- xref 7y ago
  Crazy, his exact question was answered in the post. It’s almost like scoring a perfect 0/100 on a multiple choice test...
- lightdot 7y ago
  Tap once or twice on your sarcasm detector and see if it's running. It might just need calibration since it didn't pick up the tone of the message or the emoticons. In the worst case, a complete overhaul might be required. You might want to test it on this message and note the result. Here are some emoticons to complete the test: ;) :) :D

freedomben 7y ago

This is cool. I remember going through this exact thing when RHEL 7 got released. It was many weeks before CentOS 7 was ready, and then a little longer still before Digital Ocean and other providers had images available. It can be hard to wait, but it's worth it. Looking forward to CentOS 8! Oh, also worth saying that if you create a Red Hat developer account they will give you a free copy of RHEL to test with. If you're planning to deploy CentOS 8 and want to test now, that can be a good way to get going before the CentOS 8 release. Also, thank you Red Hat! You guys are amazing. The entire world has benefited from your work. I've been a happy Fedora user for many years, and I deeply appreciate how you've made my life better. Thank you for building an amazing set of distros, and thank you for pushing forward many of the huge projects that improve our lives such as Gnome and many more. Thank you for your commitment to open source and for living your values. You are heroes to me :-)

techntoke 7y ago
Definitely not worth it if you want to utilize the benefits of updated software. I encourage everyone to switch to Ubuntu or another Linux distro over RHEL... You'll never look back.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  Sometimes stability trumps up-to-dated-ness. I know I can run yum update without breaking the system.

chousuke 7y ago

I've been playing around with RHEL 8 a bit at work. I like the direction. Definitely looking forward to CentOS 8. Work on eradicating old stuff continues. The "system python" setup also feels like an inspired choice which should make it easier to deploy python stuff on top of RHEL 8 With RHEL 7, trying to install newer versions of software via SCLs (in cases where it's advisable) never felt like they were well-integrated. The new module system seems extremely promising; fewer people will have a reason to use eg. Ubuntu if RHEL provides the new stuff via modules. Other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much that would surprise people who are already familiar with RHEL 7.