On 12/8/20 6:18 PM, Pete Biggs wrote: > On Tue, 2020-12-08 at 17:54 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: >> On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 03:15:17PM +0000, Pete Biggs wrote: > >>> "CentOS will become the developer playground" >> >> This one is categorically not the case. Even Fedora isn't a developer >> playground. Everything landing in CentOS Stream is actually *planned* (with >> emphasis intentional) to go in a future RHEL release. > > It's all the talk of SIGs and developing and testing and that Stream > will be the centerpiece of that. That's what I meant. > >> >> Previously, all the development around RHEL releases was done in secret, in >> the Red Hat black box. Now it's out of the box and can be watched. There may >> be some launch pains, but I expect the average quality of an update hitting >> CentOS Stream to be very high. > > I don't get that from the documents released today. If Stream is *not* > a test-bed, then surely the code that appears in Stream must be fully > formed in secret behind the scenes first. Yes, it will appear piecemeal > rather than in one big chunk, but it has been categorically denied that > Stream is not a RHEL 8.n+1 beta and is more a RHEL 8.n+1 RC/rolling > release. > > > I think what a lot of people are concerned about is the rolling-release > aspect of this. There will be no definitive versioning of CentOS in the > future - all you will be able to say is "fully updated" and it won't be > possible to slot a CentOS system in to exactly match a RHEL version. > Will third party RPMs built against RHEL 8.x be installable on a CentOS > 8 Stream system? The answer is surely "it depends", but there are a lot > of hardware vendors that target drivers to RHEL releases, which may > well make CentOS non-viable for hardware that doesn't have drivers > built in to the kernel. > > I suspect that for a large proportion of scenarios Streams will be > perfectly OK. But we still get software/instruments that specifically > say "only RHEL 7.4" or something like that (yes, it's a support > nightmare). > It is not the same as Rawhide is all I am saying. It is based on the current release and it is being modified for some reason. That modification can be a bugfix from a reported bug, it can be an enhancement for a given package or it can be a security update. Each of these updates will be rolled in one at a time. It is what will eventually become the next rhel source code in a few months for the next point release. Only you will know if this will work for your situation. We do have CI testing, which will be beefed up to be similar to the testing RHEL actually does right now before release of packages for the 'released version' of RHEL. Will bugs get though .. sure, they do now into RHEL. But I will absolutely say that the things they are rolling into RHEL 8.4 in a few months are not inherently less stable or less secure or whatever else you want to call it .. when compared to other Linux distros. The process that Debian would use to roll in bug fixes or Ubuntu would use to roll in bug fixes would not be significantly better or more stable or more secure.