SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS Archives

February 2021

SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS@LISTSERV.FNAL.GOV

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Lamar Owen <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lamar Owen <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 5 Feb 2021 17:17:54 -0500
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (52 lines)
On 2/5/21 3:59 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> I respectfully disagree.  There is *NO* RPM EL that does not originate 
> with a corporate for-profit overlord 
That is correct; all EL rebuilds are dependent upon RH continuing to act 
in good faith.  If I'm going to switch from one EL rebuild to another 
because RH decided to no longer sponsor the first one, then I'm setting 
myself up for a repeat performance; I have no idea if RH will continue 
to act in good faith or not, while I would like to believe that they 
will, they don't have to.  But if they don't: that is, if they were to 
decide to stop distributing source RPMS for those package which are not 
under a copyleft-style license like GPL and LGPL there is no recourse 
for the rebuilds.  Have you ever wondered why there are no rebuilds of 
the Enterprise SuSE distributions? (at least I've not ever seen one; I 
would love to be proven wrong on this point)  Go look for publicly 
available source RPMs for SLES or SLED, and no, OpenSuSE does not 
contain them (that's like saying Fedora contains RHEL source RPMs).  
(Having said that, I have not personally looked for some time, but the 
last I checked to get SLES/SLED sources you had to have a subscription).

> ...Ubuntu LTS is has Canonical as the for-profit corporate overlord -- 
> but Ubuntu is a port of a non-for-profit distro, namely Debian.  If 
> Canonical decides to diverge from Debian, anyone using Ubuntu can 
> switch to Debian with little work.  ...

Why not just go to the Debian source to begin with, then?  Canonical has 
so far operated in good faith with its distributions, but just like with 
RH they could decide to no longer release binaries or sources that are 
not copyleft-style licensed and restrict distribution outside of 
subscribers. (They are NOT likely to do this; the backlash would be 
huge!)  Rebuilding a full distribution with only copyleft-style licensed 
packages is going to be hard.

Going to Debian minimizes certain risk factors.  You can also relatively 
easily use content from PPAs; track the highest Ubuntu version closest 
to you Debian version (eoan for Buster), add the source 'deb-src' to 
your sources.list of in sources.list.d, make sure you have the required 
tools installed, do a standard apt update, and run, as a normal user and 
not root, the command
apt source --build $package_name

Satisfy the build dependencies (just like an rpmbuild --rebuild run) and 
then install the resulting package with
apt install ./$package_file.deb

Yes, I would have preferred to just have stayed put with CentOS 8. But 
not going to happen, unfortunately.  And I haven't finalized my 
decision, either; I have time to evaluate, and I'm going to use that 
time to evaluate all of my options and then decide which is best for my 
use cases, both at $dayjob and personally.  I'll decide $dayjob first, 
and then I'll use whatever I decide for $dayjob on my personal 
machines.  Just like I did with CentOS years ago.

ATOM RSS1 RSS2