Il 17/06/20 09:16, Nicolas Kovacs ha scritto:
Hi,
I just read this blog article from austrian Linux expert Michael Kofler. For
those among you who don't know the guy, he's my home country's number one Linux
expert (known as "der Kofler") and most notably the author of a series of
excellent books about Linux over the last 25 years.
https://kofler.info/centos-8-wertlose-langzeitunterstuetzung/
Disclaimer : I've been a CentOS user (and fan) since 4.x, I'm using it on all
my servers, and yes, I know the difference between upstream RHEL and CentOS.
The article is in german, but the statistics graph is eloquent enough for the
non-german-speaking users. It focuses on updates for CentOS 8, and more exactly
the extended periods of time where there have been no updates available.
The author's theory ("unspoken truth"): while it's a positive thing that Red
Hat is sponsoring CentOS, the amount of sponsoring is just insufficient enough
so that the product is "starved to death" by Red Hat (e. g. IBM) to encourage
users to move to RHEL.
The author's conclusion is quite severe: in the current state of things, CentOS
8 is not recommendable for production as updates are lagging too much behind.
While CentOS 7 may be usable, CentOS 8 has been "degraded to teaching and
testing purposes".
Still according to Mister Kofler, this "sorry state of things" will probably
encourage users to move to Oracle Linux, the other big RHEL clone.
After some hesitation, I decided to share this on the mailing list. Since this
raises some concerns, I'd be curious to have your take on this.
Cheers from the sunny South of France,
Niki
Hi Niki,
this is a sad thing but I'm not surprised by this and this is what I'm
thinking about CentOS since 8 was released. The CentOS team does a huge
work to release CentOS8, CentOS Stream and maintaining 7 and 6. Thank
you so much for this CentOS Team.
But since the core team is composed by 6(?) member is obvious that they
can't maintain all this versions without being in late and because it is
supported (but maybe supported is the wrong word in the current case) by
RH, if RH really interest about CentOS release they should put more
effort on CentOS Development. This is not what is happening and since 8
is released, it seems a try and buy distro.
I walked through 6.5 to 7 and 8. In 6.5 I was new, in 7 I really
appreciated CentOS but with 8 I noticed that it is not supported like
CentOS 7.
I use (like you) centos on all my server, some are anchored to the old
stable and other on 8 (but not production). I liked it very much that I
use it also on my workstation.
About update blackout, this is a great problem for production system
faced on Internet. SELinux can mitigate the risk (but also selinux got
security fix) but this is always an issue. Many report that the gap
between RHEL release and CentOS release is too much but I'm not
interested in how much time centos releases get through the build
process but I'm interested that, when a new centos release (major/minor)
are on the way, all others releases (current stable inside) will get
security updates during the build process and not left alone. Another
minor issue about updates are relative announces on ml that works for C7
but not for C8 (I read in a reddit AMA why this happens). This is
annoying because I need to follow every RHBA to see what happened and
why a package is updated or blindly install updates. This is another
thing that is not so good for a server.
If the theory "unspoken truth" is real I don't like how RH is trying to
encourage me to switch to RHEL and this is a bad way to do this.
About Oracle as alternative. Oracle Linux is not an alternative to
CentOS but for RHEL and if I will force to pay for enteprise system
currently I will pay RHEL, not OL. Over this, OL is not the only
enterprise distro that a "user" could choose. If support is needed there
are SUSE (SLES) and Ubuntu. For who that don't need support there are
Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (I'm talking about the most used but you know
that slackware,FreeBSD are in that list), so many alternatives are in place.
I hope that things will be better but in case of "failure" I will
evaluate other alternatives to CentOS for this "sorry state of things".
Thank you for sharing, I found it interesting.
My 2 Cent
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