Upstream and downstream (was Re: What are the differences between systemd and non-systemd Linux distros?)

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On 10/18/2018 4:41 PM, Warren Young wrote:
On Oct 18, 2018, at 9:41 AM, mark <m.roth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
people are tired of screaming and yelling about
systemd, because we've had years now of the response being "tough, it's
the Wave of the Future"
We covered that back when RHEL 7 was still in beta: the time is far too late to change the init system of RHEL 7.  The fact that you’re tired of being ignored doesn’t enter into it: you could still be yelling about it, and it still wouldn’t change.  Red Has simply isn’t going to swap out its Enterprise Linux init system within a major release cycle.

I believe it’s certain that RHEL 8 (and thus CentOS 8) will also be systemd-based, since we’d be hearing about the change by now via Fedora if it were otherwise.

This brings to mind a video I was pointed to not long ago of Brendan Conoboy's talk at a Dojo recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQsUdLPJW20

For quite a long time, many (perhaps most) folks had assumed that Fedora functioned more or less directly as the internal alpha for RHEL, with a branch at some point occurring, followed by pruning of packages, hardening, vendor testing, and release. Subsequently, CentOS (even after the RH integration) functioned *strictly* as a clean-room downstream rebuild, with the ability to do unsupported things, like alternate architectures, or heavier kernels, restricted to what could be done while maintaining a 100% binary compatible rebuild. Any contributions back up where taken to be incidental, from CentOS users reporting bugs that could be verified against RHEL.

Conoboy, on the other hand, takes great pains during the speech to describe a much more fluid and complex interaction between CentOS and its upstream, and puts forth CentOS as a mechanism (perhaps the best mechanism) for the winder EL community to contribute (something?) back into RHEL's future. He also gives clear signals that various Fedora steps have been in directions that Red Hat did not want EL necessarily going, and that the simplistic assumptions we've commonly been making aren't really correct.

Obviously, there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy there.

The wider EL community is trapped between a rock and a hard place somewhat. If you try to direct Fedora into the needs of EL users, you stand a good chance of getting told to pound stand, and that EL is getting in the way of bleeding-edge progress. Traditionally, CentOS has had its hands tied since it aims to be 100% compatible with upstream. Red Hat (and Red-Hat-as-a-sponsor-of-CentOS) might do well to clarify just what type of back-and-forth it wants out of the wider EL-using community. Does it want direct feedback in the form of tickets? Should people form SIGs? Obviously RHEL7 is not changing init systems, but where should one talk about the future?


Poettering is like upper management: they
know, I mean, Everything, so why should they need to talk to end users (or
working sysadmins)?
The suggestion that Red Hat is not listening to working system administrators beggars belief.  That’s pretty much the basis of their company’s major income stream.

What Red Hat is not doing is filling every demand from all working system administrators.  They’re choosing which demands to address, as any software project management must.

This seems a bit specious. How many working SA's and Engineers at paid shops call up their Red Hat rep for something like this? This isn't the type of thing you demand a strategy conference call from them for unless you're absolutely huge, or you have a very bored manager. People just complained (heavily) about it internally, went back to fixing the latest crisis, and hoped the adults working on RHEL would do the right thing when it came to reliability. I'm sure Red Hat understands that looking at the financials of dropped licenses and counting up the total of any vague, complaining support tickets are not the whole picture.

On the other point (while keeping personalities out of it)... I think EL users are likely to have more experience in large, enterprise organizations -- the kind of orgs where technical decisions sometimes take a back seat to politics. Everyone's seen a land grab in person, and everyone's seen, and probably done themselves -- I know I have, techniques for getting a toe-hold, leveraging it into a larger area of control, and ensuring your project becomes pretty much indispensable. The suggestion that this has occasionally happened at Red Hat and that questionable technical situations might have resulted doesn't seem unreasonable, even if it is indeed out of scope for this list.


-jc

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