Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released” [LWN.net]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 13, 2022 0:01 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240)
In reply to: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released” by pebolle
Parent article: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 released

I wanted to hit the ground running with RHEL 9. I was surprised and annoyed when the press release went out and I couldn't download RHEL 9 right away.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 15:34 UTC (Sat) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

The release announcement for things like RHEL 9 is set up to coordinate with an event (in this case, Red Hat Summit) which has a hard deadline and the vast majority of people who consume RHEL are *not* going to jump on RHEL 9 day one, or even before RHEL 9.1.

Big software companies are going to "announce" at major events whether the software is shipping yet or not. That's when press, investors, analysts and decision makers are focused on announcements and that's when it's going to be announced. I get where you're coming from, but being annoyed by this is like being annoyed because the sun rises at an inconvenient time for you.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 15:52 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

As ever: it depends and people's motivations vary. There's a bunch of people who will want to see what it's like - whether you can move cleanly to it from a previous iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example. There's some who will be relying on the regular release cadence that we've come to expect from, say Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - twice a year in May and November - date based, fairly well.

[And there were and are a bunch who missed out on CentOS 8/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 who may be looking to cross-grade machines or upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 to "something" before 2024]

Precisely _because_ it's announced at a major conference, that's exactly when you would expect it to actually be available for download as a stable release for the early adopters. Red Hat don't normally announce when beta releases are due so the first you know is when they turn up and then you get the major release ??? time later.

I'm fairly sure that I can't upgrade 8.6 -> 9 straightforwardly - so that's yet another futile re-install. Dear IBM - I know that the only thing that matters to you is containers and clouds these days but at least learn from Debian in ease of updating - oh, and reproducible builds would be handy too for confidence. Roll on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to actually make some progress from Red Hat 9 which is what some of us remember as the last "real" Red Hat (and before distributions started playing the version numbers game).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

Posted May 14, 2022 17:19 UTC (Sat) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

> I'm fairly sure that I can't upgrade 8.6 -> 9 straightforwardly - so that's yet another futile re-install.

Actually, Red Hat supports in-place upgrades[1] from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. I expect that in-place upgrades from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 will be supported with the same tooling.

[1]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ent...