[CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 4:21 PM JD Maloney <jdphotography7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> How will Stream work for the numerous projects and tools (some open source
> some other-wise) that have targeted RHEL/CentOS X.Y versions for
> compatibility?  Things such as Lustre, IBM Spectrum Scale, OpenZFS,
> Mellanox OFED, Intel Omni-Path, etc. (these are ones I’m very familiar with
> being in HPC, but I’m sure there are others).  Will there be mechanisms
> within Stream to set things at a release version of RHEL (maybe via a set
> of repos?) so that Stream can be used without having to carefully manage
> package versions via yum/dnf version lock, etc?
>
> A lot of the above tools/projects don’t bring support for an X.Y version
> of RHEL until 1-4 weeks after the RHEL release drops, which has
> historically worked out well anyway for CentOS because of its inherent
> delay also.  For instance I’m not sure I could get Mellanox drivers for the
> 8.4 kernel (that I understand is currently in stream).  I’ve been using
> most of the above mentioned tools for the better part of the past 7 years
> and they don’t survive across an update from CentOS X.Y —> X.(Y+1) very
> often, if at all.
>

There is a connection between point release orientation and chronic delays
adapting software to updates to the underlying OS.  Anybody who has been in
ops for more than a few months takes it as a given and it's easy to rattle
off a litany of reasons why it can't be any other way.  If we stick with
point releases, that might be true.  Yet, if those same vendors are
participants in a continuous development model, those delays could be
reduced, perhaps even eliminated.  If this is a thing members of the
community want to develop, it's probably the kind of thing CentOS Stream
should enable.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Linux Project Lead / Red Hat, Inc.
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