On Fri, Jul 09, 2021 at 12:27:19PM -0400, Mike Rochefort wrote:
When it comes to CentOS Stream, should the ID_LIKE parameter be changed to properly designate the upstream nature of CentOS in regards to RHEL? As of now, both Stream 8 and 9 are using the classic CentOS identifier of "rhel fedora". If the change of being upstream is strict enough, CentOS should be changed to "fedora", and RHEL should be altered to "centos fedora". However, I've got a feeling a lot of scripts and tooling may be looking to see if "rhel" is in the ID_LIKE parameter, which may end up preventing installations of software on Stream for limited reasons. I don't have any examples or numbers to back that up, just a hunch on how people use the os-release (and redhat/centos-release) file.
Is this something that should be adjusted, or left as is for compatibility?
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.
From my experience in EPEL, most of the time packages compiled for RHEL (which is what EPEL is) work fine in Stream anyway.
Best regards,