On 7/9/21 6:06 PM, Mike Rochefort wrote:
On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 5:58 PM Michel Alexandre Salim via CentOS-devel centos-devel@centos.org wrote:
CentOS Stream is basically less than one minor version ahead of RHEL (except for when the corresponding RHEL does not exist yet, as for CS9).
I feel like dropping 'rhel' would break a lot of use cases unnecessarily. e.g. for the software targeting RHEL you mentioned, we want the vendors to be testing on Stream to be ready for the next EL minor releases anyway.
Breakage caused by this was my main concern. I'm neutral on this either way, I just wanted to know what the broader consensus was in terms of how strictly to interpret "upstream".
From my experience in EPEL, most of the time packages compiled for RHEL (which is what EPEL is) work fine in Stream anyway.
I feel such a change would mostly impact proprietary tools. I've seen some weird checks that rely on /etc/<distro>-release or perform generic checks on the os-release file without really looking deeper. Which has been fine in the latter case because 'rhel' was provided under CentOS.
An example of the former came up in the forums regarding the Abaqus software by Dassault Systemes. It checks for a " 8." pattern in the redhat-release file during install to know which system it's on, which wouldn't apply to Stream. Obviously removing the "." would 'solve' this scenario, but it's still not a clean or portable method across distros.
I think you want to make stream work so that when people are building for items for RHEL 9 .. it just works in stream as well. I am not sure what benefit we would see in changing it, compared to leaving it alone.
And for the record .. CentOS Stream is infinitely more like RHEL than Fedora.