[CentOS-devel] Queries on CentOS Stream

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 2:51 PM Japheth Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org> wrote:
>
> On 1/8/2021 11:30 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 2:25 PM Japheth Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org> wrote:
> >> On 1/7/2021 7:42 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> >>> On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 09:43:09AM +0000, Chan, Catherine [ITS] wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Question 2
> >>>>
> >>>> In the announcement, it states 'If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a
> >>>> production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet
> >>>> your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.'  Can you
> >>>> highlight what are the drawbacks of CentOS Stream causing not encouraged
> >>>> to run on a production environment?
> >>> These same drawbacks apply to traditional CentOS Linux. Red Hat has never
> >>> officially recommended CentOS _anything_ for production use. With CentOS,
> >>> there are no service agreements, no support, no one committed to making sure
> >>> your problems are resolved in a timely manner (beyond the best efforts of
> >>> volunteers). A lot of people can live with that, but for real production,
> >>> Red Hat's business is based on the idea that the value of a subscription is,
> >>> well, valuable to you.
> >>>
> >>> You mention that you are in a university. Are your servers for academic
> >>> (teaching, learning, and research) use or are the part of university
> >>> administration? If it's the former, stay tuned for upcoming new RHEL access
> >>> programs which may apply to you.
> >>>
> >> * CentOS Linux (as a *product*) is free as in speech.
> > Forgive me, but CentOS Linux is a project.  I think the distinction is
> > important because there are tradeoffs either way between a project and
> > a product.  CentOS Stream is also a project.
>
> My understanding is that CentOS is a "project", and CentOS Linux
> (including updates and intended support) is a "product" (e.g.,
> https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product).
>
> Either way, I'm intending to refer to the distribution(+updates) as a
> whole here and not individual software components, which will be GPL,
> BSD, MIT, or whatever.
>
>
> >> * RedHat Enterprise Linux (as a *product*), when licensed for
> >> education/non-commercial/whatever program use, is free as in beer.
> >>
> >> If the "RHEL access programs" were announced three months ago (perhaps
> >> with a beefed-up UBI package set) there would have been cheers across
> > Can you elaborate on the UBI part?  What about the current content set
> > isn't sufficient for you?  What usecases are you trying to solve with
> > it?
> >
> > josh
>
> I had in mind mostly things like
>
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1758354
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1758358

OK.  Thanks for the very specific pointers.

> Containers may have a variety of use cases. And while I understand that
> this is a subset of packages and not the full RHEL release, missing
> low-level items means it can't be relied on as a generic solution to the
> OS problem. Adding in the equivalent of CentOS Linux versions of the
> missing packages was considered as a solution, but now a reliance on any
> of that has to be re-evaluated.

The low-level libraries are indeed a pain point in several ways right
now.  We continue to gather feedback on what is working and what isn't
and refine the UBI package set over time.  It's always good to hear
what people are doing and why, so again I appreciate it.

josh