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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