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

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 2:21 PM Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 12:21:48AM -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure Matthew Miller is talking about EUS releases, and he
> > is missing that all RHEL minor releases are actually branches whether
> > EUS or not. Red Hat is developing N+1, and N+2, while publishing N,
> > and mirroring N to CentOS 7 and 8. I covered this in more detail in my
> > other posts.
>
> I am a little confused by your messages on this topic. You are vehemently
> telling me that I'm missing something and don't understand, while you
> explain in greater detail the same thing I said: RHEL minor releases are
> actually branches, while CentOS Linux rebuild minor releases never were.

Ahh. "No one cares". It's not that we don't appreciate someone doing
the back end work safely and consistently.  The back end git branching
and tag versus release used for tracking development. We see the RPMs
and SRPMs, not the git history. And what we see, or I see, is that the
point releases are used just like git tags. They're a reference point
for the software building system. When I use "mock", I'm pointng at
the "CentOS 7" or "CentOS 8" mirrors, and those are pointed to the
point release and expected to have consistent, reference images as a
mass. We have a similar same thing with docker images and any internal
corporate "golden images". The stable reference content is very like
that of a git or other source control tag, you expect the same dang
thing if you run the same building tools again. And as I understand
the CentOS releases, it is *designed* to be as close as possible to
the RHEL labeled point release.

Discarding the point releases discards that reference, OK, I don't
know what else to call it in this context but a tag. If I have to do
this from scratch.... well, I'm going to have to do something like get
a complete set of installation media and take my reference
repositories from that, or otherwise burn time and disk space I'm not
happy to spend.