[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the CentOS platform

On 12/19/20 1:34 AM, Mark Mielke wrote:
> However, these are significant reasons why CentOS Linux is superior to
> CentOS Stream:
>
> 1. Bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL. This is important or a variety
> of reasons, particularly including reproducibility.
> 2. Minor release milestones to stabilize branches.


Reproducibility *is* important.  Minor releases, however, are not 
necessary to achieve reproducibility, nor are they sufficient. Red Hat 
does fix bugs within minor releases:

https://access.redhat.com/errata/#/?q=&p=1&sort=portal_publication_date%20desc&rows=10&portal_advisory_type=Bug%20Fix%20Advisory&portal_product=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux

Therefore, if you operate an environment where reproducibility in your 
test environment is a critical feature, you should be testing and 
deploying on the *same* underlying OS.  Maybe that means you test and 
then deploy gold images, or containers.  Immutable infrastructure is 
popular for good reason.

If you have mutable systems, there's no mechanism to keep CentOS and 
RHEL packages perfectly in sync.  You're not actually getting 
reproducible builds out of that setup, even if you think you are. It 
doesn't make a good argument in favor of keeping CentOS.


> I don't agree with you that CentOS cannot be two things. It's quite
> normal for most projects to have an "upstream" and a "LTS" branch.


Fedora is the upstream branch.  CentOS Stream is the LTS branch. RHEL is 
the LTS branch with point releases (semantic versioning) and vendor support.