How will Stream work for the numerous projects and tools (some open source some other-wise) that have targeted RHEL/CentOS X.Y versions for compatibility? Things such as Lustre, IBM Spectrum Scale, OpenZFS, Mellanox OFED, Intel Omni-Path, etc. (these are ones I’m very familiar with being in HPC, but I’m sure there are others). Will there be mechanisms within Stream to set things at a release version of RHEL (maybe via a set of repos?) so that Stream can be used without having to carefully manage package versions via yum/dnf version lock, etc?
A lot of the above tools/projects don’t bring support for an X.Y version of RHEL until 1-4 weeks after the RHEL release drops, which has historically worked out well anyway for CentOS because of its inherent delay also. For instance I’m not sure I could get Mellanox drivers for the 8.4 kernel (that I understand is currently in stream). I’ve been using most of the above mentioned tools for the better part of the past 7 years and they don’t survive across an update from CentOS X.Y —> X.(Y+1) very often, if at all.
There is a connection between point release orientation and chronic delays adapting software to updates to the underlying OS. Anybody who has been in ops for more than a few months takes it as a given and it's easy to rattle off a litany of reasons why it can't be any other way. If we stick with point releases, that might be true. Yet, if those same vendors are participants in a continuous development model, those delays could be reduced, perhaps even eliminated. If this is a thing members of the community want to develop, it's probably the kind of thing CentOS Stream should enable.
Brendan Conoboy / Linux Project Lead / Red Hat, Inc.