Morning all,

I have to concur with Trevor and Kay on a lot of points...

The more CentOS feels exactly like "RHEL - but without
support", the more people understand it and take stock.

There's an inevitable amount of trepidation around any change in direction from a Community Project and the current changes for CentOS are pretty significant, it seems wise to keep a clear and distinct link between CentOS and RHEL to allay any such concerns.

In any "What does this mean to us?" conversation it would be very soothing to be able to say something like "Well, we'll move from CentOS 6.$x to 7.$y and that will continue to maintain compatibility just as before but the community will also be doing $z as well etc...".

Seems better to work around issues with the RHEL versioning scheme than to

If the SIGs need a versioning scheme for the layers on top of the base o/s then the new naming scheme sounds good for those but the core o/s, I believe, should stick with mirroring upstream release numbers.

At $work we do actually use a %YYYY%MM postfix in our Spacewalk set-up to keep monthly snapshots and I think the idea in the abstract is a good one (although YYYYMM is specifically excluded from ISO8601 for clarity reasons). However we add the date ourselves "independently", is there any reason the SIGs couldn't use the -$TAG in the same way? Allowing the core to remain unambiguously equivalent.

It might even allow different SIGs to try different formats/options, find the best and then transfer control of the -$TAG format back up-stream to the CentOS Project centrally if there's agreement and then around(?)-stream to RedHat themselves? It could save their support guys any confusion of the future RHEL9 with the truly legacy "Red Hat Linux 9", a point I vaguely remember someone mooting about 7. :^)

--
Regards,
Phil