From: David Sommerseth <[log in to unmask]>

On 28/04/2019 22:42, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> On 4/28/19 11:03 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I'm pretty sure any chance of systemd being replaced any time soon is
> vanishingly small.  Embrace it, file bugs, move on with life.

+1

>> - c++, cmake, python, php, etc are always 1-2 versions behind those required
>> by packages we need to use
> 
> This has been a problem inherent with "Enterprise" distributions that value
> stability over new features.  That said, I've found that RHEL7 has been much
> more aggressive with updates (sometimes annoyingly so) that EL6 was.  Also,
> with modules in EL8 hopefully this will be much better.

Correct.  In addition, there is the devtoolset packages which provides
up-to-date compilers as well.  I'm doing my primary development on EL-7,
testing builds with native EL7 and GCC version 6, 7 and 8.  Just install
yum-conf-softwarecollections.noarch and you have all the devtoolset variants
available.  This repo also provides up-to-date PHP and Python packages as
well.  In regards to up-to-date CMake, Fedora EPEL provides cmake3-3.13.4.

SCL isn't necessarily the best approach for all use cases, but it certainly
works if you want to make it work.

>> - 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)
> 
> NIS, seriously?  FWIW - I use autofs with LDAP (by way of IPA) extensively
> without issue.

+1

>> - incoming mess up of X11 via Wayland graphics
> 
> This does not seem tied to any one particular distribution, unless there are
> some trying to avoid Wayland altogether? Though I can't imagine that being
> viable for long.

Isn't Fedora shipping with Wayland enabled by default nowadays?  And Ubuntu is
moving towards this direction too.  IIRC, Wayland is also under tech-preview
for RHEL-7.  I would be surprised if Wayland wouldn't be shipped in RHEL-8.

[...snip...]

>> 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.
> 
> I run with automatic updates and have never seen a systemd update force a
> restart of every system service.

+1 ... never seen anything like that at all, on something like 20+ SL7 boxes
over several years.

In addition, there is the "exclude" setting you can add to the
yum{,-cron,-cron-hourly}.conf config files.


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth