Building CentOS 8 | Hacker News Reader

Building CentOS 8

wiki.centos.org

174 pointsrbjorklin28 comments

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 :-)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Full disclosure: I work for Red Hat Consulting

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

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?

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.

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

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

From the page:

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

Crazy, his exact question was answered in the post. It’s almost like scoring a perfect 0/100 on a multiple choice test...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The last part of your comment seems quite absurd.

Simply put, just because you may not know of anyone in your immediate professional or social circles using RHEL, does not mean it's not extremely popular in the capital E enterprise.

AFAICT, RHEL is the Linux distribution of choice in most enterprise IT organizations /because/ of it's commitment to long-term support, stability, ABI compatibility, programs like EUS, and so forth--the list goes on.

All the very large enterprises I've worked for were so happy to move away from RHEL due to being cumbersome, old, and poor quality.

CentOS took weeks last time for Cent 7, and also Cent 6. Nothing has changed since Red Hat took over.

Also, I do find your lack of respect and gratitude for Red Hat for releasing all their stuff fully open source and allowing projects like CentOS to flourish despite the cannibalization quite distasteful. Not that you care what I think, but it definitely smacks of entitlement mentality.

Lack of respect is RHEL itself. Linux is doing just fine without it and flourishing. They are just a sales organization selling something old and dying to make a little more profit. RHEL is like the VMware of Linux distros.

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