[CentOS] I'm looking forward to the future of CentOS Stream

On 11.12.2020 08:25, Gordon Messmer wrote:
[...]
> For practical purposes, CentOS Stream will need to be fully patched for 
> compatibility purposes, just like CentOS is, and will be equally suited 
> for production purposes.

Allow me to disagree. We both trust Chris Wright's words, don't we? CTO 
won't lie. Citing him:

"To be exact, CentOS Stream is an upstream development platform for 
ecosystem developers. It will be updated several times a day. This is 
not a production operating system."

[...]
> Based on the information available today, I expect CentOS to be a very 
> reliable, reasonably secure distribution of GNU/Linux with Long Term 
> Support.  And judging by Red Hat’s mention that Facebook’s internal 
> groups either are already using an internally curated OS built from 
> CentOS Stream, or will be using it soon, I think I’m not alone in 
> believing that.

I do not wish to argue with all your statements. Mostly they look 
reasonable. However, there's an unpredictable variable in this equation, 
namely RH.

The major problem here is the breach of trust. A year ago RH's CTO is 
singing charming songs that CentOS won't go, now we see an abrupt 
direction change. This time, CTO keeps silent (I wonder why).

Also, there's change in patterns. With CentOS, I reduce updates to 
minimal ones. That's significant: the management doesn't like the idea 
that updates can be applied daily, and glitches may happen at any 
moment. The management prefers the known devil.

With current CentOS life cycle the number of upgrades is typically 
small. And even if I reduce the number of CentOS Stream upgrades to 
minimal one, the base advantage of CentOS is lost: predictability. At 
any given moment I could be sure that it has the same quirks and bugs 
the matching RHEL has.

CentOS Stream has its advantages and use cases. The problem is, no one 
cared to estimate what use cases of majority of current CentOS users are.

Damn, RH could at least bring formal apologies for changing the promised 
lifecycle. Instead we see the typical marketing blah-blah-blah of how 
that would benefit everyone. Nothing shows better the actual RH attitude 
towards the CentOS community.

-- 
Sincerely,

Konstantin Boyandin
system administrator (ProWide Labs Ltd. - IPHost Network Monitor)