[CentOS-devel] CentOS Stream and major releases

[Jim Perrin]

On 10/6/19 5:13 AM, Jonathan Billings wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2019, at 10:24 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It sounds like extra work to maintain an intermediate release between
>> RHEL and Fedora. It also sounds like an attempt to bring EPEL projects
>> in house, which has been tried before and often broken stable
>> software. I refer to ansible, and most recently python 3.6.
> 
> I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Stream is for.  This is my interpretation, based on what I’m seeing in the repo and the documentation.
> 
> Right now, if you look at 8-stream, there’s only one group of packages that are newer than base, the kernel and supplementary packages that’s versioned along with the kernel, such as perf.
> 
> In base, the kernel version is kernel-4.18.0-80.1.2.el8_0.
> In stream, the kernel version is kernel-4.18.0-144.el8
> 
> So when you look at the changelog of the kernel in 8.1 when it is released, I believe you’ll see that 4.18.0-144 will be one of the intermediate version-releases, up until the version built for 8.1.

This is correct.

> 
> As far as I understand it, 8-stream will show the ongoing development *OF RHEL*.  For the kernel, fixes that are necessary get cherry-picked into to the release that came out with the minor version, so you’ll see 4.18.0-10.1.3.el8_0 in the next kernel of CentOS 8.0, while the release of the 8-stream kernel will continue to increment, such as 4.18.0-145.el8.
> 

Also correct.

> I imagine that things like GNOME (which often gets larger updates between RHEL point releases) we’ll also see that development first in 8-stream.  If there’s another OpenSSL rebase in a point release, we’ll see those versions in 8-stream.  It means we can start preparing for these updates ahead of time.  It’ll provide some more transparency to what to expect.
> 

This is the heart of it. For layered projects like oVirt, RDO and anyone 
developing things to run on top of rhel, minor point releases can be 
problematic when 700+ packages suddenly shift. CentOS Stream should 
break that work down into more frequent, but much smaller bite sized 
chunks.


> Fedora will continue to be upstream from RHEL for the major releases, and changes will likely filter in (such as with GNOME), but CentOS will only see those changes through RHEL.

We do have a roadmap where contributions from the community could come 
into RHEL, but there will be some guidelines around this. We'll be 
working out what those look like in the reasonably near future.


-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
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