On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 9:00 AM Glenn Cooper <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> CERN and Fermilab have been closely evaluating the Linux distribution landscape. We observe that national cyber infrastructure organizations are increasingly supporting more science domains, so in addition to LHC- or HEP-specific considerations, it will be useful to have a choice that is widely recognized and meets the needs of broader science research.
>
> Red Hat has made a proposal to CERN regarding an academic licensing scheme. Ultimately this would require significant overhead at external sites, and therefore we have worries on this proposal’s attractiveness for other sites.
>
> Going forward, we propose to target CentOS Stream as the standard distribution for experiments. We feel that deploying CentOS Stream 8 is low risk, and we now have months of experience running IT services and experiment offline workloads on CentOS Stream 8 without any significant issues.  We feel that should issues arise with the adoption of CentOS Stream 8, it would be straightforward to reevaluate other options before CentOS Stream 8 support ends. CentOS Stream 8 is a supported distribution until May 2024. Trivial migration paths are provided by the various ELC (Enterprise Linux Clone) communities.

I suspect that the provenance and the stability of the point releases
previously available to Red Hat and CentOS will be desired for stable
experimental environments. It certainly was for me when I did medical
research.

May I encourage you to be prepared to datestamp rsync mirrors of
CentOS Stream based relases? I do not know if CentOS media releases
will match the RHEL point releases, and yes, they were point releases,
according tp /etc/redhat-release and according to the RPM names. I
don't anticipate that going away before Red Hat gives up on continuous
releases, *again* just as they did with the fmarketing fiascos of Red
Hat 9. Some lessons need to be releard.

> Continued support for existing workloads on Scientific Linux 7 and CERN CentOS 7 will be maintained as previously planned.

It's getting harder. Backports of critical utilities like gnutls,
needed for support of current Samba releases, is a problem. So are the
out-of-date python releases: Tools like ansible, published by Red Hat,
have been announced as requiring python 3.10 for future releases, and
I've personally tried backporting that to RHEL 7 and CentOs 7. The
resulting mess is not pretty and does not compile on RHEL 7.