On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 9:31 PM Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 04:39:32PM -0800, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
> >
> > It has been almost exactly seven years since Red Hat bought CentOS
> >
>
> The way I remember it, RedHat approached CentOS lead developers and
> made them an offer they could not refuse.
>
> >
> > Very curious how CERN and Fermilab will respond to this.
> >
>
> Nothing from CERN yet. But to sense where the wind is blowing,
> note how ROOT still do not provide a binary kit for CentOS-8.
> https://root.cern/releases/release-62206/

> Our experiment at CERN (ALPHA anti-hydrogen trapping and spectroscopy)
> uses CentOS-7 and we are in discussions over upgrading to CentOS-8
> or Ubuntu LTS 20.04. All our RaspberyPi machines will probably
> become converted from CentOS-7 to Raspbian (Ubuntu/Debian). For DAQ and
> analysis machines, there is a preference for CentOS-8, but if we they
> tell us now that CentOS-8 is a dead end and in 1 year will will have
> to upgrade *again*, Ubuntu may become the preferred solution.

I'm unhappy with CentOs 8. The primary python 3 is already obsolete,
python 3.6, and should have been published as "python36" rather than
"pythone3" to allow a compatible "python38" parallel upgrade path.
Unfortunately, they've convinced EPEL as well to name packages
"python3" for "python36" packages in EPEL 7 and EPEL 8.  Guess what
fun this causes over in the Amazon Linux world, where "python3" is
"python37" and python modules from EPEL can no longer be used safely.

Do not get me *started* on "modular RPMs", which have proven very
destabilizing for building anything, for which there is no usable
documentation on how to build them or resolve circular
incompatibilities. And the unnecessary and unwelcome split among the
channels "base", powertools", "appstream" and "my uncle's secret ninja
repo that RHEL originally refused to publish because you shouldn't
need those to compile things we compile in-house", now called "devel"
were unwelcome splits.

And oh, the "we leave out encryption related components for popular
open source tools that we used to publish in RHEL 7" have eaten my
development time building up python module tool chains, especially for
awx, the ansible tower equivalent. I'm pretty unhappy about it.