[CentOS] moving from centos 8 to stream? (and possibly back again?)

On 10/4/19 10:34 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
>   just installed stock centos 8 x86_64 and did "dnf update", now
> reading up on centos stream, and wondering:
> 
> 1) can i, at any time, decide to convert this system to centos stream,
> notwithstanding any normal updates i've done in the meantime?
> 

Yes .. centos stream contains centos 8 PLUS other things that will be in
RHEL 8.x + 0.1.

> 2) if i'm running centos stream and decide it's just too progressive
> for me, can i dial it back to "regular" centos down the road?
> 

Maybe.  Once CentOS Stream is fully implemented (not now .. probably a
year from now) .. If you move to CentOS Stream, you will be basically
running what will be in the NEXT minor version of RHEL (code wise .. so
if RHEL 8.1 is released .. stream will contain things based on Source
Code for RHEL 8.2).  So this means if they were to rebase something to a
newer version for RHEL 8.2, when you shift back to the older version in
regular CentOS (based in this example on RHEL 8.1 source code) .. will
it still run.

The answer is .. it depends.  If you rebase a library .. say part of
gnome .. then you build something against that (maybe Mate or Cinnamon),
then those extra things you built would need to be built again, against
the OLDER gnome library, if you shifted back to the older version.

So .. if you installed ONLY items from the main CentOS repositories ..
it would be easy to switch between stream and normal.

Switch to stream:
dnf install centos-release-stream
dnf update
reboot

Switch back:
dnf remove centos-release-stream
rm -rf /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Stream*.repo
dnf distro-sync
reboot

That would theoretically work if you never added anything outside the
main CentOS repositories.  Obviously .. IF you add 3rd party
repositories or if you build and add other software, you (or the 3rd
party repo maintainer) would need to build against the correct versions
of the development files for regular CentOS 8 or CentOS Stream 8.

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