3 ms·

The title is a bit misleading IMO. > What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS. CentoOS Stream is stil

by cheph 6y ago

The title is a bit misleading IMO. > What was the specific change? It seems that Red Hat said it would invest in Stream but not CentOS. CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing.

INTPenis 6y ago
Yes I was looking for someone to see it from my view. At least I assume we are on the same page here. What I see here is Redhat optimizing the release cycle. Please correct me if I'm wrong or my english is bad but it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream than the overhead that was each CentOS release. And in that process they gain a sort of dev branch of RedHat that people can use to get a distro as close as possible to what RedHat will be, but also beta testers.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream For many scenarios it does. It gives far more visibility into what's coming in future RHEL releases than a downstream rebuild of past point releases did. However, a lot of people are used to those backward looking point releases because "that's the way we've always done things."(tm) I also imagine that many of the same people think nothing of using cloud platforms and services that are getting changed many times a day--but those changes are invisible for the most part so it doesn't bother them. I'm not sure beta test is all that meaningful a term in a CI/CD world. Yes, there is final acceptance testing for official releases but a lot of software we use is basically changing all the time.
ghaff 6y ago
This is almost certainly underappreciated. A lot of software has moved away from long term support of point releases. Good luck getting one of the big cloud providers to commit to an unchanging point release of their platforms with backported security and major bug fixes. CentOS Stream is essentially RHEL nightlies that have gone through gating CI tests.
vetinari 6y ago
> CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing. But the point releases will be still there - but only for RHEL. The sad thing, which makes Stream unusable is, that RHEL does rebase packages between point releases. With the old CentOS you knew, that if there are breaking changes, they would be during point release upgrade. With Stream, you will get them randomly (and they did already happen several times since announcement).
- cheph 6y ago
  > With the old CentOS you knew, that if there are breaking changes What manner of breaking changes would these be? AFAIK (may be wrong, please correct if I am) by default RHEL is not locked to minor release versions (i.e. no subscription-manager release --set 8.x), but to major release versions (i.e. 8), and I have always used RHEL like this and never had serious issues with minor version updates. In this sense CentOS stream is really just what I was already doing, CentOS stream is also split by major versions AFAIU (there is 8 stream, and will be 9 stream)[1]. EDIT: [1]: https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q6-will-there-be-separateparallelsimultaneous-streams-for-8-9-10-etc https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q6-will-there-be-separatepara...
  - vetinari 6y ago
    Stream is already at 8.4 kABI (kernel modules ABI). If you have any binary kernel modules that are not compatible, too bad. (For example, ZFS is still on 8.3). Poppler is going to be rebased from from 0.66.0 to 20.11.0. If you have anything linked to it, it will break; you need new binaries linked against the new soname. There is a surprising number packages linked against it, and third-party ones too (e.g. GDAL, used by all geo apps out there). Similar thing will happen with other rebased packages. RHEL users will get that packaged in 8.4, with release notes. Stream users are getting these breakages randomly.

by cheph 6y ago

INTPenis 6y ago

Yes I was looking for someone to see it from my view. At least I assume we are on the same page here. What I see here is Redhat optimizing the release cycle. Please correct me if I'm wrong or my english is bad but it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream than the overhead that was each CentOS release. And in that process they gain a sort of dev branch of RedHat that people can use to get a distro as close as possible to what RedHat will be, but also beta testers.

ghaff 6y ago
>it seems to make a lot more sense from a development standpoint to have CentOS Stream For many scenarios it does. It gives far more visibility into what's coming in future RHEL releases than a downstream rebuild of past point releases did. However, a lot of people are used to those backward looking point releases because "that's the way we've always done things."(tm) I also imagine that many of the same people think nothing of using cloud platforms and services that are getting changed many times a day--but those changes are invisible for the most part so it doesn't bother them. I'm not sure beta test is all that meaningful a term in a CI/CD world. Yes, there is final acceptance testing for official releases but a lot of software we use is basically changing all the time.

ghaff 6y ago

This is almost certainly underappreciated. A lot of software has moved away from long term support of point releases. Good luck getting one of the big cloud providers to commit to an unchanging point release of their platforms with backported security and major bug fixes. CentOS Stream is essentially RHEL nightlies that have gone through gating CI tests.

vetinari 6y ago

> CentoOS Stream is still CentOS to me. Better to say Red Hat will not invest in CentOS point releases, as that is a lot less confusing. But the point releases will be still there - but only for RHEL. The sad thing, which makes Stream unusable is, that RHEL does rebase packages between point releases. With the old CentOS you knew, that if there are breaking changes, they would be during point release upgrade. With Stream, you will get them randomly (and they did already happen several times since announcement).

cheph 6y ago
> With the old CentOS you knew, that if there are breaking changes What manner of breaking changes would these be? AFAIK (may be wrong, please correct if I am) by default RHEL is not locked to minor release versions (i.e. no subscription-manager release --set 8.x), but to major release versions (i.e. 8), and I have always used RHEL like this and never had serious issues with minor version updates. In this sense CentOS stream is really just what I was already doing, CentOS stream is also split by major versions AFAIU (there is 8 stream, and will be 9 stream)[1]. EDIT: [1]: https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q6-will-there-be-separateparallelsimultaneous-streams-for-8-9-10-etc https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q6-will-there-be-separatepara...
- vetinari 6y ago
  Stream is already at 8.4 kABI (kernel modules ABI). If you have any binary kernel modules that are not compatible, too bad. (For example, ZFS is still on 8.3). Poppler is going to be rebased from from 0.66.0 to 20.11.0. If you have anything linked to it, it will break; you need new binaries linked against the new soname. There is a surprising number packages linked against it, and third-party ones too (e.g. GDAL, used by all geo apps out there). Similar thing will happen with other rebased packages. RHEL users will get that packaged in 8.4, with release notes. Stream users are getting these breakages randomly.