[CentOS-devel] CentOS 8/7.7

Tue Sep 10 14:37:28 UTC 2019
Ladar Levison <ladar at lavabit.com>

On 9/10/19 4:40 PM, victor mason wrote:
> The whole point of setting the update page
> at https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8 was so people didn't
> constantly ask about release dates. Redirecting queries there is
> completely fair if someone updates the damn thing. It's now been a few
> weeks with complete radio silence.


I'm not part of the CentOS team, but I did track down members of the
core team at Flock to Fedora, about ~4 weeks ago, and got an abbreviated
status update on CentOS 8, which I'll try and share. Back then the
status page listed the Installer/QA/RC tasks as "Ongoing." Based on what
I was told/understood, C8 was building, and they had it up and running
on various test machines. The hangup at that point was automating the
install process. I imagine automating that process is a prerequisite to
further testing. As you can guess, not much work was being done at that
moment because the core devs were all focused on shipping 7.7.

I offered to help and made some suggestions regarding a fix, based on my
experience automating RHEL 8/Oracle 8 installs, but of course, I
couldn't test those suggestions. If you look at Koji you'll see all the
files are there, but access is blocked. From this point I'm only
guessing, but about a week after I got that update, the status page was
updated to its current state. I take that to mean their in the
testing/packaging, preparing for release stage.

As for why it is taking so long... building RHEL 8 is dramatically
different than any of the previous releases, in part because of the
introduction of the BaseOS / AppStream concepts. There were also new
challenges, like the introduction of build dependencies which are only
used to compile the OS, but aren't released as part of the distro. As a
result, getting C8 to build required re-engineering the build process
and deploying new infrastructure (the mbox vs cbs). And that
infrastructure didn't come ready made, it had to be created using tools
that were originally designed for Fedora.

> It's been 4 months since RHEL8 was released and we are coming over a
> month for 7.7 with a bunch of security updates piling up.

Any critical security updates would have already been released
independently of 7.7. That said, 7.7 does have a number of bug fixes,
and if your keen to get those, you can enable the CR repo. Johnny posted
a note regarding this on August 16th. Of course he also said the
targeted release window was last week, so I'm personally expecting 7.7
to ship any minute/hour/day now.

>
> Nobody from the outside who depends on this has any visibility into it
> and it's frustrating. Is this an IBM thing? What the hell is going on?


You certainly are correct in saying there hasn't been much communication
from the core CentOS team.It certainly would be nice to know what the
hangups are so the community can help. Barring that, it might help for
you think of it like this: when developers go silent, it simply means
they're busy working...

L~