[CentOS-devel] An independent system-release package for CentOS Stream

Mon Sep 21 20:08:17 UTC 2020
Brian Stinson <bstinson at redhat.com>

Hi Folks,

Tl;dr: centos-release and centos-release stream are now consolidated in
a new package: centos-stream-release

Note: Throughout this email, pay close attention to mentions of
centos-release-stream (the old package) and centos-stream-release (the
new package).  These are different packages.

Our mission with CentOS Stream is to provide an early preview of what
will make it into the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To
give us a jump-start on this goal at the beginning, we took CentOS Linux
8 and added some content in extra repositories, providing that preview
for a select set of packages.

Over the past few months we’ve been adding more and more content; you’ve
likely seen more regular content updates to CentOS Stream especially now
that our automated push tooling (thanks James and Siteshwar) and lots of
package build and compose work (thanks Carl, Johnny, and Mohan) has kept
us up to date with nightly RHEL development.

To continue with our work to make CentOS Stream stand on its own, we’ve
made the following changes to the CentOS Stream compose that is on its
way out to the mirrors now:
* centos-stream-release now provides  redhat-release, centos-release,
and system-release
* centos-stream-repos controls the Stream yum repositories and is now
exclusive to the repos from CentOS Linux

What this means if you’re currently running CentOS Stream:
Please perform a `dnf update` to get the latest system-release packages

What this means if you’re running CentOS Linux, and would like to
convert to CentOS Stream:
For now, the previous method for upgrading to CentOS Stream still
applies (`dnf install centos-release-stream && dnf distro-sync`).  This
will change in the future as we plan out our future centos-linux-release
package.  Stay tuned to the mailing list for more details.

At the next CentOS Linux minor release we intend to make changes to
match. CentOS Linux would see:
* centos-linux-release will provide redhat-release, centos-release, and
system-release
* centos-linux-repos will control the Linux yum repositories

As always if you have questions or comments, feel free to chat here on
the centos-devel mailing list. 

On behalf of the CentOS Stream Team,

--
Brian Stinson