[CentOS-devel] [EXT] Re: Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream

Fri Jun 23 12:00:59 UTC 2023
Josh Boyer <jwboyer at redhat.com>

On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 7:47 AM Peter Georg
<peter.georg at physik.uni-regensburg.de> wrote:
>
> On 22/06/2023 12.56, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 6:51 AM Leon Fauster via CentOS-devel
> > <centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> I wonder if someone is in the role/position to shed some more light on
> >> the topic as announced here
> >> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
> >>
> >> Any deadlines? Does this target only EL10 or also any current release?
> >
> > It is in effect now for RHEL 8 and 9 and will continue for any future
> > RHEL releases.  The development and source code for all of these
> > releases will continue to happen through the CentOS Stream project.
> >
> > RHEL 7 and CentOS Linux 7 are not affected.
> >
> >> Would be great if some discussion/communication could be happen. Thanks!
> >
> > If you have more questions, please ask and we can try to address them.
>
> I do indeed have a question. The Kmods SIG currently provides artifacts
> for both CentOS Stream and RHEL. To achieve that we have established
> some automation using GitLab CI to avoid human interaction as far as
> possible. For that to work we do need access to the following sources
> from RHEL (version numbers are just examples):
>
> kernel-5.14.0-284.18.1.el9_2.src.rpm
>
> or
>
> linux-5.14.0-284.18.1.el9_2.tar.xz (which is included in the src.rpm).
>
> So far we have downloaded the tarball from git.centos.org/sources
>
> However, my understanding is that new versions of these files will not
> be provided anymore. In fact the example listed here (current RHEL 9
> kernel) is already not provided anymore.

Your understanding is correct.

> Is there any way for a CentOS SIG to access these files? Note that it
> needs to be in a way we can automate the access and even detection of
> new versions added. Both has been possible so far.
>
> In a later stage we also need access to
> kernel-devel-5.14.0-284.18.1.el9_2.{aarch64,ppc64le,x86_64}.rpm which we
> have not been able to retrieve from RHEL directly so far, hence we used
> one of the RHEL rebuilds as a source. With the unknown future of these,
> we'd prefer to also have a way to access these directly from RHEL.
>
> Any help in how we can modify our build automation to continue working
> after the announced changes are very much welcome. In case there are non
> we'll very likely have to stop producing artifacts for RHEL (but not for
> CentOS Stream, obviously).

Red Hat has a program for Open Source projects to access RHEL
directly.  I've copied the Red Hat liaison who should be able to talk
with the kmod SIG about this program and see if it's suitable.

We also have EPEL setup to build directly against RHEL, so we may be
able to look into the solution it is using.  I'm not familiar enough
with the infra details to know for sure, but I suspect that would
require some rework of various things.

josh