Re: CentOS 8 future

[Lamar Owen <lowen@xxxxxxxx>]

On 12/12/20 10:34 PM, Konstantin Boyandin via CentOS wrote:
> My only concern ATM is whether RH can change its CentOS 7 maintenance 
> plans as well, all of a sudden. 
This is what bothers me, too, but in a slightly different way.  Even for 
the GPL software, Red Hat actually doesn't have to provide public access 
to the source code; the only thing required by GPL is that those who 
receive binaries must be able to get sources.  So, even though it has 
been said that the source will be available, well, it was also said that 
C8 would be supported to 2029.  There are enough packages in RHEL with 
non-GPL licenses where it would be very difficult to rebuild the whole 
distribution without them, and RH is not required by those licenses 
(MIT, BSD, and others) to redistribute those modified sources even to 
people who have been distributed binaries.  So, while I want to believe 
that the sources will remain available, that belief relies on trust, 
which unfortunately is less abundant these days.

So while using another rebuild seems to be a good stopgap solution, I do 
wonder if it will prove to be sustainable post-2021.  I'm personally 
looking at which of the four (that we know about) to possibly go to; I 
just really doubt I am going to use Oracle; Rocky isn't really there yet 
and is very young; Springdale is available, mature, and academically 
supported (nothing wrong with that, just a statement); CloudLinux OS 
Project Lenix isn't yet released.  Out of the bunch, Springdale would be 
my first choice right now because it's been around a very long time and 
is available now.  C8 is supposed to be around until end of 2021, so 
there is some time for the dust to settle and the way to become more 
clear, though.  But CentOS 8 Stream is only an option for me if the 
hardware driver KABI synchronization issue is solved and stays solved.  
RHEL?  Under the current subscription models we just can't afford it. 
(Cost also keeps SLES out of the running.)

But I'm now seriously considering just simply going to something that is 
both older than Red Hat, fully and totally open, extremely 
well-supported by a diverse developer community, and used by a whole lot 
of people.  Yes, that's Debian; until I realized where the name came 
from (Deb and Ian) it read to me like a play on 'deviant.'  The 'stable' 
period is shorter, for sure.  The tradeoffs are pretty simple: 
guaranteed openness versus less change for ten years.

So, let's look at that last piece.  CentOS 6's support just ended; what 
have the last nine years and three months of actual C6 support looked 
like?  I supported several C6 machines, and there were distinct 
challenges early on, at least for the first four years or so.  Since 
then, on the server, it's been very stable, but really old; key pieces 
of infrastructure software we use slowly became unusable on C6 due to 
the old versions of specific packages, and either a third-party repo 
with newer packages or a newer CentOS was needed.

Third-party repos have improved over the years, but some of the earlier 
C6 machines I installed had packages from Linuxtech, Dag, ATrpms, 
City-Fan (one particular DVD burner that just had to have the non-wodim 
cdrtools for some reason; yes, I know all the warnings about that repo), 
and others.  Having EPEL and Dag both package a few things that I 
needed, but package them differently, introduced me to package pinning 
and repo priorities.... I don't miss those days.  Seriously stable in 
the core repos means very little when you need much less stable 
third-party repos to get actual work done. That's also why Fedora isn't 
really an option, just too much package churn; been there, done that, a 
few years ago.

So I've started re-evaluating just why I use CentOS anyway; the answer 
really boils down to the fact that I started out with Red Hat Linux in 
1997 (I live in North Carolina, and I've always liked supporting local 
companies) and I just really don't want to change; it feels like I've 
wasted so much effort if I change now (that was the reason I stuck with 
it through the Fedora-RHEL split years ago, too, and went with a RHEL 
rebuild, first WBEL then CentOS).  But the reality is not nearly so 
stark; a vast majority of the information and skills I've picked up in 
these years are portable to other distributions; so it's not wasted 
effort.  Well, other than RPM packaging skills; those are a bit less 
portable.  Whenever I've built from source I've tried to either build my 
own RPM for it or rebuild the Fedora RPM for it, and so I have a local 
repo of those packages, making reinstall much easier.  So it becomes a 
tossup: small change to another rebuild now, possibility of major change 
later, or bite the bullet and go ahead and get the major change over 
with and only have small changes later.

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