On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 9:34 AM Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
But from a user perspective, packages built from source code that will become the next RHEL minor release in less than 6 months is absolutely as "stable" and "usable" as any enterprise distribution out there besides RHEL. The fact that it has a 5 year lifetime and is free is as good as any released distribution out there.
It doesn't necessarily work, without all the other bits being updated at the same time. I'm particularly thinking of the "yum update --security" update that included curl-libs and broke wget until you did "yum update wget" or "yum update" for all components. There was also the "python3" versus "python36" adventure in RHEL 7, which is ongoing, and I anticipate similar adventures if and when python 3.8 is released for CentOs 8 Stream^H^H^H^H RHEL 8. I try to play nice, and have worked with updates to various components (published to third party repos, in particular) that were broken when the base OS got updates. I'm particularly concerned about breaking EPEL components.
This is an unavoidable risk of beta environments, whose updates of critical components and libraries may occur at any time and without any warning, kind of like the announcement of CentOS 8 stopping the publicaiton of point releases. I'm very skeptical, due to a lot of scar tissue, that critical daily use components like "awscli" from EPEL will not be broken on an entirely unpredictable basis with an update in CentOS Stream to, say, the "PyYAML".Python module. Python and many other modular tools, can be very vulnerable to one component being upgraded without the rest being upgraded.
I get it, people want what they had. Hell, I want it too. If / When the other downstream RHEL source code builds happen, use them if that is what you want. None of that requires bashing CentOS. CentOS is not bashing any of those distros.
It's very difficult to trust CentOS right now. Production grade services are... very mistrustful of "beta platforms", with good historical reason. The answer seems to be "Get RHEL."