[CentOS-devel] Proper CentOS Stream value for ID_LIKE

Fri Jul 9 23:06:45 UTC 2021
Mike Rochefort <mroche at redhat.com>

On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 5:58 PM Michel Alexandre Salim via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
> CentOS Stream is basically less than one minor version ahead of RHEL
> (except for when the corresponding RHEL does not exist yet, as for CS9).
>
> I feel like dropping 'rhel' would break a lot of use cases
> unnecessarily. e.g. for the software targeting RHEL you mentioned, we
> want the vendors to be testing on Stream to be ready for the next EL
> minor releases anyway.

Breakage caused by this was my main concern. I'm neutral on this either
way, I just wanted to know what the broader consensus was in terms of
how strictly to interpret "upstream".

> From my experience in EPEL, most of the time packages compiled for RHEL
> (which is what EPEL is) work fine in Stream anyway.

I feel such a change would mostly impact proprietary tools. I've seen
some weird checks that rely on /etc/<distro>-release or perform generic
checks on the os-release file without really looking deeper. Which has
been fine in the latter case because 'rhel' was provided under CentOS.

An example of the former came up in the forums regarding the Abaqus
software by Dassault Systemes. It checks for a " 8\." pattern in the
redhat-release file during install to know which system it's on, which
wouldn't apply to Stream. Obviously removing the "\." would 'solve' this
scenario, but it's still not a clean or portable method across distros.

-- 
Mike Rochefort