[CentOS-devel] CentOS 7 and release numbering

On 06/20/2014 11:53 AM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> The user problem is that either users are at the tip, or not. Having
> different version names might make that more obvious, but I bet that
> people who don't stay at the tip won't notice.
> 

Thats a great way to put it - and i think it highlights the issue as
well, the idea of the 'tip' should always be '7' and never 7.0 or 7.1,
since that what everything uses ( yum, installer, metadata etc ). And
realistically, I think everyone sort of works with that. Switching from
7 to 7.x is a manual step anyway, and I assume that people doing that
would carry on doing it regardless.

The issue becomes complicated when there are point-in-time snapshots,
even from the CoreSIG for things like docker images, cloud images etc
where we need to have new ones done ( hello heartbleed! ) which dont
have a connection with an upstream 1:1 - these images do still need to
retain an upstream connection to the last point release, and having the
7.YYMM notion helps with that.

Remember that the machine instance is still going to report ( or it
should report 7.0 via lsb_release etc ).

Does it make things easier if we also adopt a Name for the release ? eg.
7.1406 (Alpine) to indicate 7.0 ? and all Alpine releases would be 7.0
dereived.. with  Balsa being 7.1 etc ? I'm not a big fan of naming,
becuase then its no longer a case of running CentOS-7/Final for the
large chunk of the userbase who do track tip, it will be
CentOS-7/Some-name. Ideally, we would leave the Name tag for SIG's to
pickup. eg. CentOS Linux 7.1406 Final is the distro and CentOS-7.1406
Gluster migth be a variant installer from the Storage SIG folks.

So in summary : I think we should continue to use CentOS-7/Final as the
main distro that everyone runs, and use the 7.YYMM to indicate the isos
set, with metadata inside the installed machine still reporting whatever
rhel point release it originated or maps to. Everything that has
happened in the past, stays intact - except the ISOS release is
announced as '7 1406 - rebuilt from RHEL 7.0 sources'.

- KB

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Karanbir Singh
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