Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 11, 2020 9:35 UTC (Fri) by sluna (subscriber, #109644)
Parent article: Changing CentOS in mid-stream

> Most users understand that Red Hat was never under any obligation to maintain a stable platform for them while asking nothing in return.

IMHO Red Hat get an incredible amount of feedback and testing out of CentOS (e.g. via https://bugzilla.redhat.com/). Is it correct to say that RHEL8 wasn't production-ready until CentOS8 was seriously tested by the community?

> There is a lot of talk about creating a new community-based, CentOS-like project to rebuild RHEL as before. These efforts might succeed, but it is worth remembering how CentOS struggled before it got proper financial support. Creating this kind of distribution involves a lot of tedious, detailed work, and volunteers to do that work will still be hard to find.

True. However, we don't know until we try. Those of you interested, please head over to https://rockylinux.org/

> An alternative that some may consider is to give up on the idea of an "enterprise" distribution altogether. These distributions were created in an era when one would buy an actual, physical computer, deploy it somewhere, and expect it to do its job for years. Such systems still exist, but it is increasingly common to just order up new virtual machines when there is a job to be done, and to discard them when they are no longer useful. The value offered by long-term-stable distributions in this new world is less clear. Many systems that are deployed on CentOS might actually be better off using distributions with near-mainline kernels and more current software.

In my view, those virtual machines might well be running on top of "enterprise" distributions like CentOS, so there is still a need for it.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 11, 2020 15:23 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (1 responses)

> IMHO Red Hat get an incredible amount of feedback and testing out of CentOS (e.g. via https://bugzilla.redhat.com/).

As a general comment from someone not related to Red Hat, but dabbling as a FOSS author for more than 20 years now: Having users test out your stuff is not the panacea you'd think it is. You don't want bug reports—what you want is bugfixes. Getting bug reports mostly means you need to consider and/or fix issues that none of your paying customers (or, for a smaller project, yourself) are seeing and/or care about. In any larger project, there are so many bugs of different kinds and severities that you're not likely to be able to weed out all of them anyway.

Changing CentOS in mid-stream

Posted Dec 14, 2020 18:53 UTC (Mon) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

"Having users test out your stuff is not the panacea you'd think it is."

There's some truth to that, but fortunately my experience has been very positive. First, I haven't find it that hard to minimize the time spent on upstream reports that aren't interesting. That probably varies a lot depending on the project--more popular and user-exposed projects probably require more triage.

Second, some upstream bug reports have been very useful. Either they've caught things early, or hit on a reproducer for a serious but rare crash, or just invested a lot of work in investigating the problem. In the upstream NFS world we've been lucky to have some really outstanding bug reporters.