[CentOS] Centos 7 License???

[Karanbir Singh]

On 01/04/15 18:56, David A. De Graaf wrote:
> Today I did a yum upgrade to my kvm'ized Centos 7 test machine
> (perhaps a bad day to do such a thing) and received new kernel
> vmlinuz-3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64, among many other things. 
> When I rebooted, I was asked to confirm (or renew, or some such)
> my license.  My LICENSE ???
> 
> I was booting in text mode and the actions required were
> a) unfamiliar, and b) hard to understand.
> 
> As I recall, I had to read the EULA - a worrisomely Microsoftian 
> demand - and accept it.  Of course, the terms were pretty benign.
> Then I had to continue.  I can't remember the exact language.
> Of course, now when I reboot, all this cruft is gone.
> 
> Is this a cute April Fool joke?
> If not, WTF is going on?
> 

Let me dig into some details :

When a new install is run, anaconda leaves behind content that allows
the following reboot process to run through some tasks before control is
handed back to the user - eg. setting up selinux / kdump / users and
also redoing some previously done tasks. again eg. when the storage
backend changes or a new layer is introduced.

one of these tasks is to pass through the EULA, implicitly saying you
are ok with it. the CentOS Linux EULA has always been a case of 'no
gurantee, no warranty, the sla is that there is no sla'. But I am sure
you are aware of that, since you already had a centos install to start with.

For this release, we've disabled some of the tasks that get run - but
retained the code that runs these tasks, since its actually required to
be run in some cases ( eg. with firstboot --reconfig is called ).

The option I had was to either strip out the eula process, or do
something more drastic : like not have it run at all, unless a user
asked for it to be run. And in that case, force it to always run in
LANG=C ( there are some incomple translations in the mix as well ).

I took the second option - and disabled this code completely by default,
unless its implicitly asked for - in some cases, this can be down to
system changes ( the only one i was able to find was when the backing
storage changes in a virtualised environ - but mostly large public
clouds, i wonder what your storage format is that caused this ).

the text UI isnt easy to work through, I totally agree.

In the coming days, I will try and strip out the EULA acceptance bits
from the code and request Johnny to issue an update for this.

-- 
Karanbir Singh
+44-207-0999389 | http://www.karan.org/ | twitter.com/kbsingh
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