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

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 11:06 PM Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
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> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 4:21 PM JD Maloney <jdphotography7 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> 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?
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>> 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.
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> 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.
>

At least from the OpenZFS perspective, I expect there to be no
significant issues adapting to CentOS Stream 8 once AMIs are
available. The CI infrastructure is able to continuously test Fedora
kernel updates, which move much more quickly than CentOS/RHEL ones.
The only reason it hasn't been tracking CentOS Stream 8 so far is
because of the lack of images to use.



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