On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 2:16 AM Sandro Bonazzola <sbonazzo@redhat.com> wrote:
If you have followed the oVirt project for a few releases you already know oVirt has struggled to keep the pace with the fast innovation cycles Fedora Project is following.

Back in September 2019 CentOS project launched CentOS Stream as a rolling preview of future RHEL kernels and features, providing an upstream development platform for ecosystem developers that sits between Fedora and RHEL.

Since then the oVirt project tried to keep the software working on Fedora, CenOS Stream, and RHEL/CentOS but it became quickly evident the project lacked resources to keep the project running on three platforms. Further, our user surveys show that oVirt users strongly prefer using oVirt on CentOS and RHEL.

With the upcoming end of life of Fedora 30 the oVirt project has decided to stop trying to keep the pace with this amazing platform, focusing on stabilizing the software codebase on RHEL / CentOS Linux. By focusing our resources and community efforts on RHEL/CentOS Linux and Centos Stream, we can provide better support for those platforms and use more time for moving oVirt forward.


This is a humongous mistake. Almost everything with virtualization and storage starts in Fedora. And there are some configurations that will not be possible in CentOS Stream because of the nature of it.

As far as the oVirt software keeping up with Fedora, the main problem here has always been that people aren't integrating their software into the distribution itself. That's how everything can get tested together. And this comes back to the old bug about fixing vdsm so that it doesn't use /rhev, but instead something FHS-compliant (RHBZ#1369102). Once that is resolved, pretty much the entire stack can go into Fedora. And then you benefit from the Fedora community being able to use, test, and contribute to the oVirt project. As it stands, why would anyone do this for you when you don't even run on the cutting edge platform that feeds into Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

It also seems like the oVirt folks are not learning from the mistakes of the RDO project. They gave up on Fedora several years ago, and wound up spending close to two years playing catchup on Python 3, DNF, modularity, virtualization packaging changes, storage APIs, and everything else all at once. They ground to a halt. They paid a price for not keeping up. And their excuse of unaligned lifecycles stopped being true more than two years ago, when OpenStack's release cycles aligned on Fedora's again. They also proved that Fedora's "churn" wasn't the problem because when push comes to shove, they were able to do something based on Fedora 28 (knowing it was the base for RHEL 8).

CentOS Stream is worthless in most respects because you aren't really testing or integrating anything new most of the time, you're just making new releases of your software on a stale platform. Again, the purpose of CentOS Stream is to provide a window into the RHEL stream development, which by the nature of things isn't very useful for future-proofing.


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真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!