[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

On Wed, 3 Feb 2021 at 12:13, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:

> On 2/2/21 10:26 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > Or.... a small miracle could occur, the mis-step of discarding point
> > releases in favor of making all CentOS 8 users the beta users for
> > RHEL, and CentOS go back to publishing point releases that match RHEL
> > point releases. That was precisely what happened the last time Red Hat
> > tried to discard point releases with "Red Hat 9" back in 2003. RHEL
> > came out a few years later with point releases, and CentOS was
> > developed to match.
>
> The first 'pointless' release was Guinness (RHL 7), if I remember
> correctly.  Nice bit of revisionism in your post, by the way, as the
> reality is that the CentOS 'point releases' came before RHEL's 'point
> releases.'
>
>
Yes that was the first one. RHL6 was going to be the first pointless
release but there were too many howls of protest from Engineering against
it. RHL 7 was the first boxed pointless and the plan was to try and engage
in doing just updates for 1,2,3 but that turned into too much sticking in
the mud compared to other boxed sets which were pushing they were faster to
market than Red Hat Linux. So 8 became its own thing and then 9, and there
were howls of protest from various people who had built their deployments
around X being a major and Y being smaller changes.. however the kernel and
other software were now moving at a rate where 8 engineers could not keep
up with all the packages needed at different levels.


before Shrike (RHL 9) was released.  A fun fact about Pensacola is, if I
> remember correctly, that it carried the MAJOR version of 2.1 through
> seven update cycles; so you had the last update roll-up package RHEL
> 2.1U7 in 2005, although it was supported through the end of May 2009;
> there was never a RHEL 2.2, and RHEL 2.1U7 is not RHEL 2.7.  I still
>

Yep.. the marketing reason was simple. The general IT manager rule for
large deployments is NEVER deploy software which is 1.x or 2.0 . They will
wait until 2.1 comes out. So like RHL 2.1, there was a RHEL-2.1 and yep..
people installed it a LOT more than RHEL-3 because it wasn't 3.1 . The
general rule started to change after this where Update numbers were more
important so large deployments wait until U3 [so if you had a new product
and want to get it deployed as soon as it is out.. call it Foobar-2
Update3. You may find that you get various auditing checkmarks clicked
right away.

... snipped the rest because I am in agreement with what was written.



>
> It is understandable that people want a reference point for support; a
> rolling release model makes that difficult, and thus 'point releases' to
> provide such a reference point becomes SOP, even if that 'point release'
> is horribly out of date and insecure, but has the shared-library
> link-print that the software or hardware needs.
>
> I welcome informed corrections and additions to what I've written here;
> I was an observer during this time for the most part, not a 'doer' of
> any rebuild itself, and my perspective is biased a bit by that point of
> view, I'm sure.
>
>
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>


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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