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

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 2:33 AM Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch> wrote:
>
> For me the characteristics of RedHat EL/CentOS have always been:
> * It's stable, and stable for 10 years minus the first ~1-2.
> * It's old and outdated, nothing to make developers happy.
> * It provides a quite limited package set with high stability and quality.
> A lot of interesting stuff (things like Tomcat) have to be installed from
> elsewhere without stability and high quality or easy management.
> * It has a lot of competitors but the long support is unique.
> * As an admin, if you have a lot developers around you, you ALWAYS have to
> defend the usage of RHEL/CentOS because ALMOST EVERY developer would like
> to use something else.
>
> Now for CentOS, reduce the long support to 5 years and slightly reduce on
> the overall stability. What do you get? How do you sell it to your
> customers/users who wanted something else anyway? How do you defend your
> decision for RHEL/CentOS? Difficult times for all of us in this situation!

I expect we'll see a lot of people not even bothering with RHEL 8 or
CentOs 8. I also expect Red Hat to review and discard this approach by
the time RHEL 9 rolls around: that is very much what happened when
they tried similar with Red Hat 9 back in 2003. The resistance to
point releases is understandable, especially to people trained on
"continuous integration, continuous development". But many businesses
and developers find continuous release unsafe and destabilizing,
generating constant uncertainty about their environment.

EPEL is an example of the problem. Many critical system components,
such as python modules, nagios, and until very recently ansible, were
available in EPEL as leading edge components only, without easy access
to the previous releases. It's maddening. If you have other components
that rely on stable bits, well, it's been awkward.