[CentOS-devel] A Big Idea for a New Decade [was: Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors 2019-12-18 Meeting]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2020 at 10:48, Young, Gregory
<gregory.young at solarwinds.com> wrote:
>
> My personal feeling is there have been very high barriers to contributing to CentOS.
>

> 6. For the love of all that is pink and fluffy, we need to update the versions of third party packages we ship. If RHEL won't, CentOS should. For instance, we still ship Jetty 9.2, which is EOL and not receiving security updates. 9.3 is also EOL. 9.4 is quite stable at this point (as they are about to go beta on 10.0), so we should be shipping 9.4. PostgreSQL is another example. We ship 9.2. 12.1 is the current release, and the appliance I work on is shipping 10.11 as it's stable version. 9.2 is so far out of EOL... it has been superseded by 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 10, 11 and 12. If you want an example of what we should be shipping as the stable versions, cPanel is a very good example. They run on CentOS, but sooooooo many packages have to be built by them to make their servers secure.
>

The true purpose of an enterprise software is to make sure that a site
can run crufty old software which depends on some version of a library
no longer supported by upstream beyond simple bug fixes. [I can say
from experience that updating jetty will break all kinds of commercial
payroll apps which expect X version]. In the end, enterprise software
upgrades at the rate of whatever the majority of accounting systems
need to make payroll and tax filings happen. And then you find out
that even if you move to the cloud, you still have to keep the old
records active for 10+ years for all kinds of reasons.

Enterprise Operating Systems are the semi trucks of distributions.
They are slow, lumbering, noisy but carry a lot of stuff from point A
to point B. Other operating systems are like smaller trucks or cars or
even gulf-carts.. they each have their place and reasons for moving at
the speeds they are for. The issue is to not try and expect a Bugatti
to haul a 40 ton trailer or a Peterbilt to outlap a Lamborghini [you
can do both with a lot of work, but there is little  practicality of
said work.] And I would not want either one of them on a golf course
unless I was expecting to returf the entire area.




--
Stephen J Smoogen.