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

On 12/29/20 5:16 AM, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> Ubuntu is targeting for easy to use, with reasonably newest versions. Since the design
> of Ubuntu is fundamentally different (e.g. setting root password is not mandatory,
> multiple Linux Security Modules are available compared to SELinux-only), CentOS Stream
> won't be able to behave like Ubuntu due to constraint between Fedora and RHEL.

I think TOMOYO support in Ubuntu is inherited from Debian, which was 
proud to be the only distribution supporting all LSM frameworks. Ubuntu, 
and Debian since Buster, default to AppArmor. That probably makes it 
more likely to see the greatest amount of testing in individual 
packages. TOMOYO's learning mode was pretty cool, I played with it years 
ago in Debian.

> Default gcc provided in CentOS 7 became too old to compile Linux kernels.
> Many projects which follow the trend want latest version of compilers.
> Wouldn't developers who want latest versions already using Fedora/Ubuntu ?

Red Hat provides newer versions of compilers for RHEL and CentOS, as 
well as interpreters like Ruby and Python, in Software Collections 
Library (at least part of that moved to AppStream in RHEL 8 - I thought 
compiler will stay in SCL because users might want to have several 
versions installed in parallel, but I don't find any sclo directory in 
the CentOS 8 repos).

I think they support each collection for 18 months, and they even 
guarantee the binary compatibility between new compiler like gcc-9.3.1 
in devtoolset-9 and the system compiler (gcc-4.8 in RHEL7), so it's 
possible to link object files and shared libraries compiled with 
different versions of gcc. The softwarecollections.org site sadly seems 
no longer updated, but you can browse available packages in CentOS repos:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/sclo/x86_64/rh/Packages/d/