On Wed, Oct 5, 2022 at 3:44 AM Honza Horak hhorak@redhat.com wrote:
(I've sent this before, but it seems to have never reached the mailing list, so re-sending again; although less interesting today, when RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 Beta are already out, yet I believe the thoughts about Stream concept are worth looking at).
As you likely know, CentOS Stream is a new concept that allows the community to see what future RHEL brings. Let me touch on a few specific things that you can test in CentOS Stream 8 and 9 for some time already, and couldn't see in a released RHEL until recently.
Module streams concept is used in CentOS Stream 8 and 9 (and thus also in the future RHEL-8.x and RHEL-9.x versions) for delivering alternative versions of popular stacks for developers (except other components). You can for example try the latest Node.js version 18, Ruby 3.1, or Maven 3.8. How? Let's see an example with a CentOS Stream 9 container image:
Is anyone at all finding modularity to be genuinely helpful? Because EPEL has abandoned modularity, compiling or integrating local versions of packages or EPEL related packages has been a real hindrance for those of us who publish new python RPMs or backport them from EPEL. Given EPEL's abandonment, it does not seem to have been worth the resulting instability.
The older method of publishing packages with a suffix for the release versions worked noticeably better, as it did for perl, python, java, gcc, autoconf, make.and ruby.