[CentOS] EL 6 rollout strategies? (Scientific Linux)

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday, May 10, 2011 09:17:39 PM Craig White wrote:
>  Upstream released exactly 6 months ago and still
> nothing and apparently today's target date has slipped, and 2) until
> CentOS admits that there is a problem, nothing will actually change.

Please read the CentOS-devel list and IRC channel.  There are some changes going on WRT visibility of the process, and time will tell if that sticks. 

My gut feel, not being one of the developers doing this, is that once the package build order and buildroots are figured out for 6.0 that 6.1 should be far less work.  But I reserve the right to be wrong.

How long it will take is of course anyone's guess; after all, it's been quite a while since 5.6's release, and SL, as fast as they were with 6.0, doesn't have a 5.6 full release out (beta 2 is due this Friday, but that's a beta and not a production release.  Of course, they've also backported security fixes where possible from 5.6 back to 5.5, but that's part of their policy, plan, and procedures).  

To get these things right takes time.  CentOS spent the time up front on 5.6 and 4.9, and both of those were released non-beta before SL released those versions; SL has since released 4.9.  Both projects are doing a fantastic job of trying to nail the proverbial blob of gelatin to the wall, and I've hesitated comparing them in any way, simply because I don't want to disparage either project.  And the two projects are not in competition.  And neither project has a fully visible buildsystem.

In my case, I have essentially three choices:
1.) Use SL 6;
2.) Wait on C6;
3.) Buy RHEL6.

All of the three have costs, visible and hidden.  3 obviously has monetary costs, but both 1 and 2 have time and risk costs, since neither SL nor CentOS will be as fast on updates as choice 3.

There are boxes I'm possibly going with SL, but my servers are likely to remain CentOS, unless and until I can get funding to purchase RHEL (which, since it's a subscription, must be purchased out of opex funding).  But I fully realize that if I want a fully supported product in the EL space I'm going to have to pay for it, either with RHEL or Oracle or SuSE.  Otherwise I'm going to be happy with what I get, even if that's late.