Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability [LWN.net]

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 21, 2023 17:00 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
Parent article: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

IIUC (I work for Red Hat but not on how sources are distributed), there is absolutely no change in practice.

CentOS Stream RPM sources are stored in GitLab therefore the whole history is available including past minor releases of RHEL. The only change is that the repositories will not be mirrored to git.centos.org.

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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 21, 2023 18:11 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

That's nice to hear. I'd say that the blog post that sparked this is a bit muddy on this point.

In practice, does this mean that the RHEL clones will still be able to identify the source that makes up a RHEL release / minor release to rebuild it, or is that going to be (on purpose or simply as a byproduct) obfuscated too much to rebuild a RHEL release going forward?

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 21, 2023 19:45 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

There may be some issues if an embargoed issue hits very close to the release, but generally it should be okay.

The relevant bit in the (admittedly cryptic) post is "To be clear, this change does not signify any changes to the CentOS Project, CentOS Stream or source availability for CentOS Stream or CentOS SIGs". The changes for rebuilders are minimal but I can see why the author didn't want to say they are not affected.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 21, 2023 19:49 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Thanks for the clarification / response. Much appreciated.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 22, 2023 14:20 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

A clarification to your comment from mroche on HN:

Some clarification is needed here.
git.centos.org (g.c.o) has been the historical canonical local for RHEL sources that have been exported out of Red Hat. On any given package you would see several branches, one for each major release and other organizational artifacts (e.g. c7, c8, c9, etc). Initially CentOS Stream 9 was exported to g.c.o as it wasn't a true upstream in the full sense of the word, but with CentOS Stream 9 that changed. c9s is developed in full on GitLab, and now c8s as well, while the final RHEL sources for those packages are still output to the c8 and c9 branches on g.c.o.
What changes here is that Red Hat will no longer be exporting the c8 and c9 content to any git platform (c7 will continue as exists until its EOL). Customers can access sources as needed via the Customer Portal and CDN repositories, but sources in git form will not be publicly available for those artifacts. Moving forward, only c8s and c9s sources will be available, and g.c.o will not see any updates for EL8 and EL9.
While most (I'd estimate at least 95%) of the platform will match in terms of NEVRA between versions available in CentOS Stream and their RHEL counterparts, there are some packages that will not due to the way they are developed.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Posted Jun 22, 2023 17:06 UTC (Thu) by andrewsh (subscriber, #71043) [Link]

Here’s even a more detailed explanation by Aleksandra Fedorova. The summary:

3) So what happened?

CentOS Engineers will not be producing that git repo of exploded SRPMs anymore because there is no need for them in CentOS project.
Red Hat recommends to take RHEL sources from CentOS Stream repositories because that is the actual source from which RHEL packages are built by RHEL Engineers.
Can you still get access to SRPMs and create exploded sources repo - Yes. But there is no practical reason for Red Hat or for CentOS Project to maintain such a service.
There is no change in Fedora or with anything related to Fedora.