[CentOS] Switch from SL -> Centos

[夜神 岩男]

On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 10:46 +0100, James Hogarth wrote:
> >
> > An idle question:
> >
> > What is the advantage of switching to CentOS 6 if you already are
> > running SL6? Or at least... what is the purpose? I'm not really clear on
> > the difference (other than CentOS is the noisier bit of the party).
> 
> Plus when you have many systems (read 100+) to manage it is far better
> to keep things consistent.... The 'test' Sl6 boxes that were used for
> simulation of how C6 was likely to be will be replaced here so that
> only CentOS channels are in Spacewalk and no SL etc.... it also
> eliminates package confusion in Spacewalk (for instance) due to
> identical NVREA between the channels...

But that was my point, why the switch in the first place if SL6 was
consistent?

I may be missing the point. We have a large environment to manage (lots
of systems distributed across several organizations) but the application
requirements are fairly uniform and many userland packages get rebuilt
and managed by us anyway. I suppose that makes our deployment a niche
spin of its own -- only the very core is really unadulturated SL6.
Perhaps incongruencies simply get squashed by our rebuild process so I
may have never noticed awkwardness in SL6 that others find intolerable
(is it awkward for some?).

We would have fielded CentOS 6 with partial rebuilds but for the delay
(and a few other issues -- the level of decision-making mystery
surrounding it being another) -- it was intolerable and came down to
simply getting an RHEL contract (hard to balance against some expenses
which we just can't eliminate through external support), internally
forking a LTS version of Fedora (which may still happen at some point
not soon), or getting SL6 and doing partial rebuilds where necessary.

Now that a consistent environment exists based on SL6 I'm wondering what
are the merits, if any, of attempting a lateral (and somewhat backward)
migration to CentOS 6? It seems it may not be worth the effort in my
present environment, but in other environments what would be the benefit
other than reverting to a more familiar name?

-Iwao