[CentOS-devel] Proper CentOS Stream value for ID_LIKE

Thu Jul 15 20:59:11 UTC 2021
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 7/9/21 6:06 PM, Mike Rochefort wrote:
> 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.
> 

I think you want to make stream work so that when people are building
for items for RHEL 9 .. it just works in stream as well.  I am not sure
what benefit we would see in changing it, compared to leaving it alone.

And for the record .. CentOS Stream is infinitely more like RHEL than
Fedora.