On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 02:15:42PM +0200, Maarten wrote:
> Hello fellow SL users,
> I having been using SL for a while now, ...
> there will be no SL8...
> the future [?]


I look at the future throught the mirror of today's problems.

And today's problems in the RH/CentOS/SL universe do not project a bright
sunny future:

- systemd is a mess up. with luck IBM's purchase will clean house on this one.
- c++, cmake, python, php, etc are always 1-2 versions behind those required by packages we need to use
- ZFS is not part of the base system, does not play well with kernel updates
- NIS will be removed in el8, with no replacement (LDAP need not apply unless they sorted out handling of autofs maps)
- incoming mess up of X11 via Wayland graphics

On the data analysis side we are married to CERN via the ROOT data analysis package,
and the vibes I get from ROOT developers is that CERN Linux 7 (CentOS7) is not their
primary target. (for example we had a problem with ROOT graphics where ROOT's LLVM collided
with LLVM inside the el7 OpenGL library. For sure, Mesa has it fixed "in the latest version",
but for us running vanilla CentOS7, nothing worked. And still does not work, the best I know).

So it looks like we will be looking at Linuxes other than RH/CentOS, especially
if a popular systemd-free variant somehow emerges. A move to Ubuntu is quite likely
just because it tends to have recently recent c++, python, php & co.


P.S. What's the beef with systemd? Apart from sundry bugs (for example, sometimes
it does not respect the startup order specified in the unit files), we have been
forced to disable all automatic updates (usually a nightly cron job). This is
because an update of the systemd package triggers/forces the restart of every
system service (nis, nfs, autofs, etc), effectively a reboot of the machine
(minus rebooting of the linux kernel). Not a nice thing to happen on production
machines on random nights whenever updated systemd is pushed out (usally 2-3 times a year).
Of course in our experience, about 50% of the time something goes wrong and one of the services
restarted by the systemd update does not restart correctly yielding a dead machine.
Rant over.


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada