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

On 1/14/20 4:13 PM, Phil Perry wrote:
> On 14/01/2020 18:57, Rich Bowen wrote:
> 
> Hi Rich,
...
> 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.

Right. That's the process that we are currently working on, and we hope 
to have more detail on timelines in the coming days and weeks. This is a 
work in process, and we don't have all of the answers yet.

> 
> 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?

Right. That's how we see the process working. But, as we were trying to 
communicate with this message, we're not there yet. It's a big task to 
get from the workflow we had in the 7.x days to what we hope to have 
with CentOS Stream.

And, rather than announcing a fait accompli, we're trying, as we hope 
you've seen elsewhere, to be more transparent about what we're working 
on, and where we're headed. But that necessarily means that we're not 
there yet. And, a lot of that work is necessarily "behind the scenes".

We're working on both the contribution process, as well as the 
process/tooling for pushing content to the Stream repositories in an 
automated fashion. And we're trying to bring that process into the 
light, so that you can know where things stand.

-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
@CentOSProject // @rbowen
859 351 9166