What's in a (CentOS) version number?

Posted Jun 14, 2014 11:07 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: What's in a (CentOS) version number? by jspaleta
Parent article: What's in a (CentOS) version number?

Why do you think 3rd party vendors suppport RHEL (and, sometimes, SLES) exclusively? Because they hate developers of all other distributions? Nope. They only support RHEL to save on support costs. As long as you don't explicitly say that you are using not RHEL but something else they could pretend that they don't know about that fact and will continue to support you.

Actually even if you'll say that you use CentOS they will not stop supporting you right away. More likely you'll hear something like “we don't support CentOS, try to reproduce on RHEL”. But if you'll show that package works on RHEL just fine but will continue to insist that they should “fix” to also support CentOS… what could they do? Eventually they will be forced to actually cite the piece of contract which lists supported distributions and cancel you support.

Note: if you think that they will go and fix their package because “it's so very easy” then you are wrong. In most cases bug will not be even shown to developers before it could be reproduced on RHEL! That's the whole point after all. It's possible that some developer will receive a world from his (or her) friends and will fix the package in question to be CentOS-compatible, but don't count on it as a rule. CentOS is tolerated till support of RHEL-conpatible packages is done by CentOS developers, if people will insist on theating it as anything but full RHEL clone it'll quickly lose even that thin “you don't say I don't hear” support it has.

P.S. And yes, separate redhat-release and centos-release look like a best solution to me.

What's in a (CentOS) version number?

Posted Jun 19, 2014 12:34 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

On top of the reasons you're giving, note that it's not unknown for the 3rd party vendor to want to be able to punt problems in their dependencies back up to the enterprise Linux vendor. You may simply get an answer of "RHEL ticket opened - we'll push them on a fix, but you need to tell your support contact that you need the fix for #abcdefg ASAP."