On Tue, 2020-12-08 at 19:52 -0800, Brendan Conoboy wrote: > On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 6:00 PM Pete Biggs <pete at biggs.org.uk> wrote: > > > The problem is that we won't know if it will work. When CentOS matched > > the RHEL point releases we knew that an RPM/driver targeted for RHEL > > 8.2 has a good chance of working on CentOS 8.2 - but that versioning > > match is lost with Stream. So vendors will either have to produce > > another version of their RPM for CentOS 8 Stream (and continuously > > check to see if it needs to be updated) or, more likely, just not > > bother to support CentOS. It already happens - HPE won't support > > CentOS, but they do support RHEL and those RHEL RPMs work with CentOS. > > The only Linux they support is RHEL, so we're stuck with our HPE kit. > > > > Cool, I understand where you're coming from. If the world remained static > after this announcement I would be more concerned about this scenario. As > it is, we're in a dynamic space, and CentOS Stream will be a place that > hardware vendors can participate as well. What will be the incentive for vendors to participate? Sure you can talk the corporate talk about opportunities and ecosystems, but the bottom line is that it requires investment (at least in time) when they could just continue supporting RHEL point releases, or possibly every other point release. I understand that the reason HPE, for example, don't support CentOS is that there is no verification suite to ensure compatibility. Since CentOS is a different beast to RHEL now, are things like that going to looked at? > > > 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. > > > > So instead of keeping everything back for a point release, the packages > > are set free once they are ready. Stream is a rolling release. And > > that's fine, but it's not what people thought they were getting when > > committing to CentOS. It has always been promoted as point release > > compatible with RHEL and that was it's main attraction to many people. > > > > It's certainly a change. Yes, yes it is. It's a major change in philosophy for the distro. It's a change that should not have been thrown at the community in such a way. There are ways of delivering and transitioning; there are such things as change managers to bring the community along with you. Working to make this change for CentOS 9 in 2023/4 could have been delivered without much backlash - I don't think I have seen a single positive comment about this other than from people directly involved with RedHat/CentOS. There's politics and corporate managers behind this somewhere. P.