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

On 12/21/20 11:49 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
 >
> 5. CentOS 8 Stream is not intended to have the goal of being 
> "bug-for-bug" compatible. It is recognizing this is not possible and has 
> not been possible since probably EL5. At any given time it is not 
> necessarily aligned with RHEL X.Y or RHEL X.Y+1 but may be something in 
> between or beyond depending on when the release cycle is happening.

I recall talking about this with you and others in 2013, when we were 
trying to define "what IS CentOS Linux" compared to what people thought 
it was. Red Hat didn't want to change the project for the worse, and 
that required us having a baseline idea of what the project really did.

The reason this matters is that in 2014, it was clear that "bug-for-bug 
compatible" was the EL distro equivalent of "all natural ingredients." 
It was a lofty goal that became a comforting phrase.

Some people argued for having that goal phrasing changed for the 
project, because it was an impossible goal and setup an impossible 
expectation with the users. But frankly we also didn't want to worry 
users by making that change, and it became one of a many things about 
the CentOS brand-as-a-sponge that is hard to change.

One thing about this whole experience, it is bringing a lot of spoken 
and unpsoken expectations about the brand directly into conversation 
with the people at Red Hat who know and understand how RHEL actually 
gets made. I appreciate all the clever detective work in this thread, 
but much of it is the exercise of trying to describe an object in the 
dark by feel when the object is an elephant.

Let's bring the elephant out of the room into the sunlight, I'm getting 
tired of building better flashlights.

Kind regards,

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade [he/him/his]| Senior Community Architect | @quaid
Red Hat Open Source Program Office (OSPO) : @redhatopen
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