Bye-Bye CentOS!

[joskra42.list]

Hey Guys!  Have you been following the disruption of CentOS?  Apparently RedHat is not going to offer point releases for CentOS 8 after December 31st 2021.  Instead they are promoting "CentOS Stream", which is like a beta preview of what's coming up.

I mention this because there are a few other rebuild efforts that either already existed or are gaining traction.  I wonder if it would be appropriate to combine efforts between RedSleeve and one of those others?  (The newest rebuild effort is called "Rocky Linux" and it is spearheaded by one of the CentOS founders...)

Cheers!

-JK

[Jacco Ligthart]

Hi JK,

Yes, I followed the discussion.

I'm currently busy building RSEL8.3. I wanted to finish that and then think / discuss about future plans.

One of the things is, that I don't have a good overview of usage of RSEL8. If that is low, we could also decide to sit out RSEL7 until upstream EOL (June 2024) By that time all armv5 and armv6 machines are quite old. (Raspberry pi2, with a armv7, was introduced in 2015)

The idea to team up with another did not cross my mind yet. Now I think about that, it has some interesting opportunities:

- not re-re-branding packages

- make use of a common building framework (RSEL6 and 7 were sort of doable with a few scripts; RSEL8 is quite hard with those modules)

- make use of common branding, distribution, bug reporting, etc

@Gordan, do you have some idea about usage of 7 and/or 8 ?

Jacco

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[Bjarne Saltbaek]

Hi Jacco.

I have with success using CentOS 8 aarch64 and the "module-build-service" (Modularity) build modules locally (using fedpkg module-build-local --offline.

I can share the modifications I made for it to work.

This was first step to try to understand how to set up a Koji build system (which is sooooo undocumented).

At the moment I need to install Pagure since module-build-service/fedpkg expects a distgit repository to pull SPEC's and source code from.

Have you shared the module.txt for each module somewhere that I can use?

BR,

Bjarne

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[Gordan Bobic]

@Gordan, do you have some idea about usage of 7 and/or 8 ?

Closest I can get you is the number of times the mirrors file for each was accessed.

For 2020:

 

# grep mirrors access_log* | grep '2020:' | grep yum | grep el6 | wc -l
533

10 unique IPs
# grep mirrors access_log* | grep '2020:' | grep yum | grep el7 | wc -l
16775

47 unique IPs
# grep mirrors access_log* | grep '2020:' | grep dnf | grep el8 | wc -l
18239

4 unique IPs (!)

RSEL is mainly useful for pre-NEON ARMs. ARMv7 without NEON, e.g. Nvidia Tegra2, is problematic on CentOS because various tool chains for different packages erroneously assume that all ARMv7 CPUs had NEON when they in fact did not (it was an optional instruction set, not mandatory).

How many ARMv5, ARMv6 and ARMv7-without-NEON devices there may be in regular use out there - I don't know. I recently decommissioned and disposed of the last of my devices that fall into that category.

So the future of RS could well be in following one of the new projects that track RHEL rather than CentOS. That is the main place where I see there being value in persevering with the effort.

Gordan