Last week a group of Red Hat engineers, management, and members of the CentOS and Fedora communities, met at the Red Hat office in Boston to discuss how to implement CentOS Stream and formally kick-off the project, which, as you are aware, was announced the week before. Many details that were omitted in the original announcement were debated, and we came to an agreement on much, but not all, of these things.
First of all, I want to ask that you be patient with us. Changing the way that the hundreds of people on the RHEL team do their work is going to take time. Developing the tooling to make everything work perfectly, and in an automated fashion, is also going to take time. And some of the things that were proposed to the Board will end up changing, based on what doesn’t work, and on the feedback from you, the CentOS community, as well as Red Hat’s customers and partners.
A central point of discussion was ensuring transparency. We want to move the RHEL development more into the public, and CentOS Stream is the cornerstone of that.
CentOS Stream will be a rolling preview of what is happening in RHEL development. This will allow you to experiment with the next version before it releases, and ensure that what you are working on will work, day one, when the next minor release of RHEL is announced.
SIGs, too, will be able to build and test against this preview, so that when the next minor release comes out, there will be no surprises.
We are working on a FAQ to answer what we anticipate will be at the top of everyone’s mind, but I’ll address a few questions that we’re already receiving.
Q: How many streams will there be? Will there be a stream for 8 and another for 9? A: When the development for RHEL 9 begins, the stream for 8 will end. We plan to have a one-year overlap, to allow for transition from one stream to the other. But we do not intend to keep the 8 Stream going for the entirety of the RHEL 8 support window.
Q: How can I contribute changes? A: This is still being worked on, and we ask for your patience as we work towards this. This is indeed a goal, but getting the stream itself working perfectly must happen first. Meanwhile, we’re working with the RHEL engineering team on a process where contributions from the community can be considered as part of their regular development workflow. The last thing we want is to set an expectation that we cannot meet, so we want to ensure that we have a workable process before we start asking you for contributions.
We encourage your further questions, and look forward to figuring out with you how to make CentOS Stream successful for all constituents.