[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

Mon Jan 25 22:36:19 UTC 2021
Leon Fauster <leonfauster at googlemail.com>

Am 25.01.21 um 20:56 schrieb Mike McGrath:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 1:03 PM Laurențiu Păncescu 
> <lpancescu at centosproject.org <mailto:lpancescu at centosproject.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 1/25/21 7:29 PM, Mike McGrath wrote:
>      > A fair question.  I've been in a few discussions related to this
>      > internally and there are no plans to make changes for RHEL8 (IE: us
>      > sending our debranded(ish) code to the centos git instance).  I
>     could
>      > imagine scenarios where that gets moved to gitlab.  But generally
>     how we
>      > push will remain the duration of RHEL8 - we just won't be
>     building it
>      > into CentOS.  Don't take this to mean it's a guarantee or that
>     Red Hat
>      > promised or whatever.  I'm just saying that at the moment we've
>      > discussed it, no one is currently advocating for us to stop
>     releasing
>      > RHEL8 code in the way we do, and so we have no plans on changes
>     there at
>      > this time.
> 
>     Excuse me, perhaps I'm reading too much into your words, just for my
>     own
>     understanding: does this mean it's not clear if Red Hat will continue
>     forever to release the sources for RHEL publicly, and perhaps only
>     provide them to their customers, at some point in the future? I'm
>     thinking more from perspective of rebuilds like Alma Linux or Oracle EL
>     - they wouldn't have anything to rebuild by themselves anymore. With
>     the
>     zero-cost RHEL covering the use case of many small companies and
>     hobbyists, I imagine this would be possible.
> 
> 
> This is an area where written text falls flat and a conversation would 
> be better but here goes....
> 
> For RHEL9 and forward, I suspect we won't be doing a RHEL release, and 
> then releasing that code as we do today because.....
> 
> ... the code should already be available via CentOS Stream.  To put it 
> another way, the current plan of record is - If you ever find a RHEL 
> binary, and cannot find the corresponding source code in the CentOS 
> Stream gitlab instance, that means we've messed something up along the 
> way because it was one of the explicit goals for CentOS Stream.  It 
> might be released in RHEL first with a bit of delay (we're talking hours 
> or a day or two not weeks), like with a 0-day CVE.  But generally, it 
> should already be in CentOS Stream well before it's in RHEL.
> 
> I hope that's clearer.  Worst case, the rebuilders you're talking about 
> will have to get to know our gitlab layouts, but all the code will be there.
> 
> For emphasis: There are no plans to stop making RHEL code available to 
> the public at this time.  It will just take a different route to get 
> there than it has under RHEL8/CentOS8 and before.
> 


Without wanting to imply anything, but when I read between the lines:
This sounds that the next major RHEL releases will not provide sources
in a way, that allows someone to identify the current snapshot or point
in time of a RHEL release. That is exactly what people are complaining
about CentOS Stream and next minor release. So, everything (rpm
artifacts) are then on "upstream" (gitlab/rolling dev) and no more
"downstream" side (ftp:10yearsago, git:today). Do I misread this? (as 
you stated, a multi-modal conversation would be more appropriate)

--
Leon