[CentOS] [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1503 ) on x86_64

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Sat, April 4, 2015 4:47 am, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 04/04/15 00:13, Always Learning wrote:
>> Posted on behalf of Mark (m.roth at 5-cent.us) who is currently
>> experiencing technical difficulties with his Internet connection
>> ---------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Fri, 2015-04-03 at 11:23 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>>>
>>>> I really think that if someone is actually interested in helping the
>> project, rather than being a backseat driver and griping at every
>> change ........
>>
>>
>> Y'know, the whole thread with the naming, and the comments that it had
>> been discussed, but only on the devel list, and the talk of an
>> "ambassador" or whatever....
>>
>> Couldn't some upcoming change like this have been mentioned in
>> centos-announcements, and make sure it went to all the centos mailman
>> lists?
>
> I am going to be on the move the next few days for personal reasons, and
> will catchup with the threads and comments as soon as i am able to.
>
> however, i want everyone to sit back and reflect on what they are doing
> here - make sure you are not creating noise for the sake of creating
> noise. As we all are well aware, there is a tendency on this list for
> people to get completely carried away and lose the ability to have a
> meaningful conversation.
>

I will try to guess what upsets many people.

I remember long ago one of sysadmins was explaining to his user what
CentOS is: "it is binary replica of RedHat Enterprise Linux". I hope, this
doesn't offend anybody. That was reasonably true, and CentOS was
immediately carrying same trust, reliability and respect in person's mind
as RHEL does. (I remember my friend sysadmin whose machines run Debian was
regenerating all keys and certificates after known flop when in Debian in
random numbers generator significant portion of code was commented out for
debugging and left like that in releases for years... A said then: what a
good choice of system was the one I made: I never remember a flop like
that made by RedHat).

Now the change is happening (or already happened). CentOS grew out of
being "binary replica". Does it mean it became worse? By no means no! Does
it mean it is what it was in the past and carries the same respect as RHEL
has? No. But last doesn't matter much to rather big crowd of people who
think about RHEL after their release 7 differently (some quite
differently).

All in all CentOS seems to become distribution though based on RHEL, still
having a bunch of extra nice stuff. Great thing all in all. Those who are
upset may follow their former experience. I remember we were running
RehHat (remember free RedHat, which lasted until version 9? You can buy a
boxed set of CDs at a cost of CDs.) Then RedHat stopped doing that and we
switched to Fedora (pilot project running in front of RedHat Enterprise).
Not for long, as you wouldn't like short life cycle of system for your
machine. This last thing might have depleted the size of Fedora community,
maybe in favor of CentOS. And it is a community effort that RedHat was
always efficiently using to cook nice system on the basis of (and they
were always extremely good in my recollection in following GNU license and
releasing all source!). If my guess above is close to reality, then having
CentOS as a pilot project running in front of RHEL will be very
beneficial. (Not that Fedora outlived itself as such, it still is great
project, but CentOS may be good addition in that respect).

Again, all above is something I tried to speculate together just for my
understanding of what I observe (and should be taken with a grain of salt,
as neither my observations are good, nor my thinking is).

Valeri

PS I have to add the following in case someone recognizes me as one of
CentOS public mirror maintainers. As such (a public mirror maintainer), no
matter that some scepticism might sound in what I'm saying, I'll keep
maintaining CentOS public mirror (and vault mirror). I will keep
maintaining the mirrors as long as the mirror machine (hosting multitude
of other mirrors) exists, which will be while I have a sysadmin position
at this university. We have benefited from CentOS for quite some time, and
maintaining public mirror "forever" is that little that we can do for the
great project (and yes, many of our machines still run CentOS, and will
for quite some time to come...)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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