[CentOS-devel] Update: State of CentOS Linux 8, and CentOS Stream

On 14/01/2020 18:57, Rich Bowen wrote:

Hi Rich,

> We wanted to update you on what is happening, largely out of sight to 
> most of the community, on the CentOS Linux 8 front. We have appreciated 
> the patience of the community, but we understand that your patience 
> won’t last forever.
> 
> A lot of the work in rebuilding RHEL sources into CentOS Linux is 
> handled by automation scripts. Due to the changes between RHEL 7 and 
> RHEL 8, many of these scripts no longer work, and had to be fixed to 
> reflect the new layout of the buildroot. This work has been largely 
> completed, allowing us to pull the source from Red Hat without a lot of 
> manual work. This, in turn, should make the process of rebuilding RHEL 
> 8.2 go much more smoothly than RHEL 8.0 and 8.1 have done.
> 
> Once 8.1 has been released, work will begin on bringing this new 
> codebase, along with CentOS Stream, in to CBS 
> (https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CommunityBuildSystem) so that SIGs can 
> build packages for CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Stream.
> 

Given the time it's taking to get releases out, and the 6 month 
timescale between RHEL8 point releases, I'm struggling to visualise how 
this is going to work in practice.

What new features are you planning for CentOS 8.1 Stream and when will 
the community get to see/test them? Given that RHEL8.1 is now 2.5 months 
old and RHEL8.2 is due to be released in 3.5 months, I'm expecting a 
RHEL8.2 beta soon. At that point hasn't the ship already sailed? How are 
you expecting to get new stuff out to the community to test and feed 
back on in time for that to feed into the RHEL8.2beta development 
process in a meaningful way? I'm assuming that the RHEL8.2beta 
development process is already well underway.

Perhaps I'm just confused as to what the best/fastest route is to feed 
stuff back into RHEL (and hence CentOS). When we have verified bugs and 
patches, should we be raising RHEL bugzilla reports with patches and 
asking Red Hat to fix issues, or should we be submitting patches to 
CentOS Stream as the upstream (midstream?) of RHEL? The recent high 
profile make bug/patch springs to mind - we submitted directly to Red 
Hat as there was no current process to submit to CentOS Stream.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1774790

Still, the process is frustratingly slow. What we would like is a 
process to make a commit/pull request to the CentOS Stream git tree and 
have the CentOS Stream build system rebuild and push the package for 
testing, in a fast automated fashion. And then hopefully see that fix in 
the next minor release of RHEL. Or maybe I completely misunderstand how 
you see the process working?

> We will discuss this, and give updates of progress, on the centos-devel 
> mailing list over the coming weeks. Some of you have observed that the 
> CentOS team tends to prioritize doing the work over talking about it. 
> While that’s not all bad, it does tend to leave most of you in the dark 
> as to what it is that is being worked on, and we’re committed to greater 
> transparency going forward.
> 
> Once again, we appreciate your patience as we work through the growing 
> pains of the 8 branch. We hope to share a more detailed (projected) 
> timeline in the days to come, with the caveat that timelines always 
> change as they are being worked.
> 
>