3:13 p.m.
Progress cannot be made without change. As technologists, we recognize this
every day. Most of the time, these changes are iterative: progressive
additions of features to projects like oVirt. Sometimes those changes are
small, and sometimes not. And that’s, of course, just talking about our
project. But one of the biggest strengths of our community’s software is
that we are not alone, and because of that, changes to other projects have
ripple effects that can affect our own, even in positive ways.
This week, our collaborators in the CentOS Project have announced a change
<https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-September/023449....
in the way their software is released moving forward.
Beyond this week release of CentOS Linux 8, the CentOS team has announced
CentOS Stream, a rolling release distribution that will be the "midstream"
between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
To be clear, Fedora will remain as the first upstream of RHEL. But when
RHEL branches off, CentOS will be upstream for ongoing work on those RHEL
versions. This change gives public visibility into ongoing work on released
RHEL, and a place for developers and community projects like ours to
collaborate at that level.
CentOS has been heading in the direction of Stream for quite some time.
CentOS SIGs — the special interest groups for virtualization, storage,
config management, and so on — have given our project a way to provide
input into the CentOS platform. Now, though, we can actually provide direct
improvements or fixes to CentOS Stream platform that will be beneficial to
our project. Long-term, those project-specific changes can find their way
into the next release of RHEL, providing smoother transitions for those
users of our downstream projects.
We expect the positive effects to extend beyond our own project’s
ecosystem. Through CentOS Stream, developers will have early access to new
features and content that are being built into the upcoming RHEL version.
This will help to allow next-generation applications to have compatibility
with future versions of RHEL.
The benefits of these changes are clear for ecosystem developers working on
projects such as ours, writing hardware drivers, or extending protocols for
RHEL. As we push the innovations that start in Fedora through the new
CentOS Stream, the community will have a clear vision of the future of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux.
For users of oVirt, we expect CentOS Stream to be the preferred upstream
platform on which oVirt should be run, especially with the capability for
our users to now contribute changes to our software and the community-built
platform on which oVirt runs.
--
Sandro Bonazzola
MANAGER, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, EMEA R&D RHV
Red Hat EMEA <https://www.redhat.com/>
sbonazzo(a)redhat.com
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