On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Tim Bell <Tim.Bell@cern.ch> wrote:

Karanbir,

So far, the community input seems to be strongly in favour of keeping the x.y conventions (potentially adding a timestamp for areas such as cloud images).

Among our user community, a change to timestamp only would cause significant confusion. We do not have the opportunity to explain at length that YYMM is compatible with y and that there is a web page giving the mapping between versions.

I am not yet seeing major enough benefits to make such a change, especially at this point of transition of the community in view of the downstream difficulties it will cause for those of us supporting large user bases where these conventions are well established.

Tim

One of my personal experiences as a consultant (not a rant against Red Hat):

It was very difficult to migrate a part of about 200 managed systems used in a public university from Red Hat to CentOS.

The migration was forced by changed policy for allowed use of academic subscriptions and inability to sustain new maintenance prospect.

It was a great effort (in months, believe me) to explain, demonstrate, illustrate and convince management people.

Oracle Linux and SL was other possible choices.

One of the main reasons for CentOS selection was its perfect, clear and unique alignment with upstream (btw: upstream is still present and subscribed on critical dedicated and clustered systems).

I would like not to undergo similar or even more complex efforts again, also because FUD is easy to be injected and very difficult to contrast and answer-back.

Thanks for reading

Gianluca