
Building CentOS 8 - rbjorklin
https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8
======
freedomben
This is cool. I remember going through this exact thing when RHEL 7 got
released. It was many weeks before CentOS 7 was ready, and then a little
longer still before Digital Ocean and other providers had images available.

It can be hard to wait, but it's worth it. Looking forward to CentOS 8!

Oh, also worth saying that if you create a Red Hat developer account they will
give you a free copy of RHEL to test with. If you're planning to deploy CentOS
8 and want to test now, that can be a good way to get going before the CentOS
8 release.

Also, thank you Red Hat! You guys are amazing. The entire world has benefited
from your work. I've been a happy Fedora user for many years, and I deeply
appreciate how you've made my life better. Thank you for building an amazing
set of distros, and thank you for pushing forward many of the huge projects
that improve our lives such as Gnome and many more. _Thank you_ for your
commitment to open source and for living your values. You are heroes to me :-)

~~~
techntoke
Definitely not worth it if you want to utilize the benefits of updated
software. I encourage everyone to switch to Ubuntu or another Linux distro
over RHEL... You'll never look back.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Sometimes stability trumps up-to-dated-ness. I know I can run yum update
without breaking the system.

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elagost
Timelines are always fascinating for me to see, given the massive amount of
effort that goes into building something like this. Even though it's
essentially a "it'll be ready when it's ready" post, and we obviously know
CentOS 8 will be released at some point, I'm still very excited about it.
Thanks for all your hard work!

If anyone working on this is hanging around here, are there any particular
challenges that are unique this time around? The init system not changing
again must be quite nice, as mentioned in the post.

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bluedino
Another group of unsung heroes are the people who do the repos like Remi and
EPEL

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temac
Fascinating to see the amount of uncoordinated (with RHEL) effort going into
that, despite Red Hat now basically owning CentOS and employing the main devs.

~~~
xiaq
This really puzzles me too.

If I understand correctly, basically what CentOS does is taking the source
code of RHEL, debranding it, and rebuilding it?

Now that CentOS is officially affiliated with RH, why isn't RH just starting
with with a placeholder brand in the source code (like "$BRAND$", or something
more sophisticated to avoid conflict with all programming languages), and
substitute the brand for "RHEL" to make RHEL, and for "CentOS" to make CentOS?

~~~
h1d
Why doesn't RH just rebrand CentOS as RH while keeping RHEL for enterprise
customers to increase brand recognition?

People also feel more "official" too.

~~~
oso2k
Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting

Officially, Fedora & Fedora Server are the upstream for RHEL Workstation and
RHEL, respectively.

~~~
h1d
I see that but upstream means bleeding edge which is not exactly what CentOS
users are looking for and if there was something like RH "community edition"
which is essentially CentOS (with RH logo) that gets released with a fixed
schedule after RHEL (instead of after somewhat random moment for CentOS), it
can make people more comfortable instead of relying on the current community
to make sure to get their debranding and releasing of CentOS right. And also
it may be easier for people to upgrade to RHEL if RH provides an official way
from such "community edition".

People like and want the stability of RHEL and relying on the community to get
started with RHEL-like distro could be a concern.

If you embrace the existance of CentOS, why not do that fully as part of RH
family?

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chousuke
I've been playing around with RHEL 8 a bit at work. I like the direction.
Definitely looking forward to CentOS 8.

Work on eradicating old stuff continues. The "system python" setup also feels
like an inspired choice which should make it easier to deploy python stuff on
top of RHEL 8

With RHEL 7, trying to install newer versions of software via SCLs (in cases
where it's advisable) never felt like they were well-integrated. The new
module system seems extremely promising; fewer people will have a reason to
use eg. Ubuntu if RHEL provides the new stuff via modules.

Other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much that would surprise people
who are already familiar with RHEL 7.

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mlosapio
Thank you to the project maintainers; while RedHat does release the source
code anyone who’s actually compiled from source knows that it’s never push-
button easy

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broknbottle
can't they just use sed to replace Red Hat with CentOS ;) :D

~~~
mrbill
From the page:

"No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"

~~~
lightdot
Tap once or twice on your sarcasm detector and see if it's running. It might
just need calibration since it didn't pick up the tone of the message or the
emoticons.

In the worst case, a complete overhaul might be required.

You might want to test it on this message and note the result.

Here are some emoticons to complete the test: ;) :) :D

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techntoke
Typical Red Hat... takes over CentOS and now they are going to take their
sweet time to update it and we'll end up with a bunch of EL distros again
because Red Hat can't automate anything. It really should be built the same
day as RHEL. I don't know anyone who uses RHEL anymore though because they are
so antiquated.

~~~
type0
Opensuse and suse do their work almost in sync, now that is so fluent that you
could convert existing opensuse install into SLES. I just can't understand why
RH don't wan't more customers coming from CentOS.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
You can convert RHEL<->CentOS just like that, too.

Edit to clarify: RHEL and CentOS are binary/ABI compatible to the point where
you can switch repositories, overwrite a couple key packages, and now you have
the other system.

~~~
techntoke
So much so that it will take them weeks, if not months, to build it.

~~~
gtirloni
Converting "existing opensuse install" means converting a server from CentOS
to RHEL. That is done in minutes.

Getting the source code for RHEL, making the necessary modifications and
releasing it as CentOS is a whole different thing.

~~~
techntoke
How is it different? It is literally compiling a bunch of packages and
creating an ISO or install method. You can do this yourself and store the
packages in a searchable repo like most other Linux distros. Void was created
and is well maintained by very few people, and so was Alpine when it started.
With a little automation this should have been done at the same time RHEL was
released.

