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0 pointsSpivak5y ago0 comments

The old model went something like this.

- Fedora does its thing informed by but somewhat independently of RHEL.

- Red Hat chooses a Fedora release to be the base of RHEL, forks it, and starts working on it.

- This eventually becomes RHEL X.

- Red Hat then forks RHEL X to create the RHEL X.0 Beta and eventually the RHEL X.0 release. RHEL X keeps getting work done on it which eventually lead to another fork which creates RHEL X.1 Beta and RHEL X.1.

- After each RHEL X.y is released CentOS starts the process of rebuilding it from the sources and tracking upstream changes.

The new model puts CentOS where RHEL X is and so RHEL X.y are actually forks of CentOS.

This change matters a lot to you if you care a lot about the difference between the minor releases of RHEL because there won't be CentOS 7.1 CentOS 7.3 but just CentOS 7. If you just yum update on CentOS then you probably don't care since by default it will move you up minor versions. You have to try to stay on a specific minor version.

What's nice about this change is that anyone can peel off releases from CentOS the same way Red Hat will do to make RHEL and new features become available when they're ready instead of being batched.

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macspoofing5y ago

There is a use-case for CentOS Stream, and if all Red Hat did was announced CentOS Stream and kept CentOS proper NO ONE would have any issue with that.

There is also a use case for a production fork of RHEL as well. That's now gone. People who migrated to CentOS 8 because they thought they were getting a decade of support - that's now gone.

So what are you arguing, that the second group somehow doesn't get it?

SpivakOP5y ago

I can’t defend cutting support for CentOS 8. That’s super shitty and I don’t really understand the move.

The part I don’t think people really get is that if your goal was to have a fork of RHEL that was as close as possible to RHEL itself in absolute value that CentOS Stream is much better than CentOS is/was. CentOS always tracked far behind RHEL and now CentOS Stream will track closely in front of RHEL.

quicklyfrozen5y ago

CentOS will be useless as a replacement for RHEL. Without the guarantee of binary compatibility, any CentOS Stream update may break your locally installed applications.

And I only recall CentOS significantly trailing RHEL at the major version updates (e.g. 6 and 7). Other updates seem pretty timely, and the major version lag doesn't leave me vulnerable.

I can see this being useful for developers who are building something that needs to be compatible with the next major release of RHEL, but I'm not sure who else it will be useful for.

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