For the time being -- until IBM RH decides otherwise -- Princeton
Springdale EL 8 appears to be what SL 8 would have been, and
professionally is produced by Princeton staff. As for there being no
rebuild of SuSE SLES -- a question I asked long ago when we tested,
under support license from SuSE as required by a granting agency, it
appears that SuSE does not distribute source in as convenient a form as
RH did of that epoch, and more or less continued to do until IBM decided
otherwise. Thus, it was "easier" to clone EL than SLES, and as EL was
as "good" as SLES, there was no strong motivation for the clone -- what
you point out below.
The reason that I am reluctant to recommend Princeton Springdale EL 8 at
this juncture, in addition to the various reports of issues with RHEL 8,
is precisely what you have indicated -- it is unclear if or when IBM RH
would make future clones no longer viable. Communicating with business
types, the issue appears to be not only because the benefits from the SL
base were negligible to the IBM market share and revenue-counting
decision makers, but because of the competition from Oracle that has a
clone of EL and provides support for fee (particularly inviting for
sites that use Oracle RDMS). (Canonical provides support for fee as
well -- that being a major revenue source for the for-profit corporate
overlord.)
On a practical basis, for now, Ubuntu LTS has a corporate overlord that
employs professionals to build LTS from Debian, and according to what
has been communicated to me, not to keep LTS "bug-for-bug" compatible
with Debian but to "fix bugs" that then get repaired in Debian (as
Canonical releases source). However, I also have verified that to go
from LTS to "stock" Debian is straightforward, much more so than to go
from one EL boot install distro to another in many cases. Thus, if
Canonical does an IBM RH ploy, Ubuntu LTS departs, and Debian arrives.
The big question at this point is: what will Fermilab/CERN/HEP do? If
SL 8 remains out of the question, and licensing for fee IBM RHEL 8 is
not in the budget(s), what then? It is not just EOL from IBM RH for EL
7, it also is the internal "obsolescence" of EL 7 in that later
production releases of gc++ and the associated libraries will not be
backported into EL 7 (or SL 7), making some important applications no
longer deployable at the current production release of the application
(as I experienced with TeXstudio).
On 2/5/21 2:17 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> 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.
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