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

Tue Dec 22 00:53:02 UTC 2020
Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com>

On 12/21/20 2:27 PM, Mark Mielke wrote:
> We have internal product releases that were last built in 2016, or
> 2008, or even 1999, that would take a substantial amount of money to
> update to work on latest releases. Today, we can do this by running
> older releases. Without these baselines, this becomes "not possible".
> It's fundamentally the same problem as the buildroot problem for 100%
> perfect reproduction of RPM, but extended beyond RPM to using EL as a
> development platform.


I'm aware.  I work for a vendor that produces binary software for 
GNU/Linux systems.  This is the forward-compatibility problem that I've 
mentioned previously.

Because RHEL isn't necessarily forward compatible with future releases, 
we may need to build our applications on the oldest release that we 
support deployments on.  That's difficult to do with CentOS Stream.  I 
can think of a couple of possible solutions, but generally, it will be 
difficult to use CentOS Stream as a build root for an RHEL target.

I've been meaning to ask Red Hat if there are programs for vendors that 
need to build software for RHEL, but I haven't yet. I believe that EPEL 
has used CenOS as its build root in the past, so I assume this is 
something that they'll need to solve for.  For now, that's one of the 
exceptions that stands out when I say that I expect CentOS Stream to be 
better for most purposes.


> I can appreciate that you are not aware of this problem


Dude.  I'm trying to be civil.  I'm not really sure if there's a polite 
way to point out that a whole lot of your arguments seem to conclude and 
rest on your perception of yourself as the keeper of secret knowledge.  
You're not, and it's kind of rude.