[CentOS-devel] CentOS 7 and release numbering

Sat Jun 21 01:37:28 UTC 2014
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 06/20/2014 04:50 PM, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:

<snip>

> But, as far as I could understand, changing 7.0 to 7.20140620 (or what 
> ever date) and changing NOTHING ELSE?, as it was suggested, it would not 
> change a thing. 

You are EXACTLY right ... it will not change anything about the distro
at all .. EXCEPT be a better description of what CentOS is.  A point in
time rebuild of the major branch.  It has the "major" and it has the
"point in time".  It perfectly describes exactly what CentOS is.

> It was clearly said that there will not be any 
> intermittent releases in between 7.0 and 7.1 for example, so this change 
> should only be a PR stunt, and all that comes to mind is that Red Hat 
> would like to brake a bond between RHEL and CentOS and convert it into 
> another staging area, "learn how to work with CentOS and then you can 
> switch to RHEL", and to, in doing so, reduce the number of companies who 
> will dare to use CentOS instead of RHEL.

If you are asking if Red Hat would rather have people buy RHEL for every
server out there instead of using CentOS, sure they would.  Do they want
to convert CentOS installs to RHEL .. absolutely.  This should not be a
surprise. They also want to convert any other Linux out there to RHEL. 
And the CentOS team wants to convert all installs to CentOS.  I bet the
Ubuntu team wants to convert all Linux installs to Ubuntu as well .. at
least I hope they do.  It would be rather silly to shoot for 2nd or 3rd
place.

> I also can not get from impression that CentOS is becoming just a 
> carcass, a shell for Red Hat projects. Source rpm's will not be 
> published by Red Hat anymore, CentOS git will become a source of Open 
> Source projects that will use similar but NOT the same rpms (binary 
> compatibility?), something like SuSE and OpenSuSE, members of SL 
> transferred to CentOS project, and SL guys are discussing if they will 
> start just rebuilding CentOS packages (from git), so it all looks like 
> Red Hat found a format to distance from releasing source rpms that can 
> hurt their business by clever creation of uneasiness within users that 
> use both RHEL and CentOS, braking in the process the unofficial support 
> of major software distributors that SO FAR identified RHEL and CentOS as 
> the same thing. And change of direct link between RHEL and CentOS would 
> be a last nail to the coffin.

So, you think that we will not have the same version numbers as RHEL for
the sources ... and yet that is what we have had for all of the releases
in 5 and 6 ... and it is what we have for the current test platform for 7.

Do you really think that KB and I would allow that to happen?  Do you
think we would willing participate in something that would be to try and
lose users?

The CentOS distro is exactly the same as it has been.  It is a point in
time rebuild of RHEL source code and it always will be.  What have we
done to even hint that it will be anything else?

I want CentOS to be the most used OS in the world, bar none.  I traveled
35,000 miles in the last 9 months to go to conferences all over to world
to make sure people understand that Core CentOS is staying exactly the
same.  Both KB and Jim Perrin have actually traveled more.  We have the
7 release ready to go in a week ... you check the versions on those
RPMs, they are the same.

Are  we breaking anything .. quite the contrary.  We are working hard on
a ppc64 release.  We are working on an ARM release.  We are trying to
get bigger, not smaller. 

Core CentOS is going to be a rebuild of RHEL sources and it is going to
match up exactly as it always has.

The only way you can not believe this is to just flat out call me a
liar.  You can have that option ... but that is not what is happening
here at all.

Red Hat needs RDO, oVirt, GlusterFS, Ceph, Openshift Origin and others
to work on CentOS and it needs to work on CentOS like it works on RHEL
for them to build an EL community around these things.  They want
CentOS/RDO deployments now.  In fact, the latest CentOS openstack
numbers are extremely good.  This shows much growth:

http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey

We are bringing in CERN Linux guys to run community builders, we have
gotten Xen running on CentOS.  Do you think we would be doing that to
then just kill CentOS off.  How does that make sense?


> I AM really trying, but I can not understand what CentOS board wants to 
> do other then this PR breakage.

We want to communicate what we are really doing, a point in time release
of the major branch ... do you really NOT see that?

>
> I will, of course, hold off my final judgment allowing I could be wrong.

Do you really think that I would flat out lie about this?



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