Someone care to explain why did CentOS switch from downstream to upstream builds? I guess there is a reason.
- Fedora does its thing informed by but somewhat independently of RHEL.
- Red Hat chooses a Fedora release to be the base of RHEL, forks it, and starts working on it.
- This eventually becomes RHEL X.
- Red Hat then forks RHEL X to create the RHEL X.0 Beta and eventually the RHEL X.0 release. RHEL X keeps getting work done on it which eventually lead to another fork which creates RHEL X.1 Beta and RHEL X.1.
- After each RHEL X.y is released CentOS starts the process of rebuilding it from the sources and tracking upstream changes.
The new model puts CentOS where RHEL X is and so RHEL X.y are actually forks of CentOS.
This change matters a lot to you if you care a lot about the difference between the minor releases of RHEL because there won't be CentOS 7.1 CentOS 7.3 but just CentOS 7. If you just yum update on CentOS then you probably don't care since by default it will move you up minor versions. You have to try to stay on a specific minor version.
What's nice about this change is that anyone can peel off releases from CentOS the same way Red Hat will do to make RHEL and new features become available when they're ready instead of being batched.
There is also a use case for a production fork of RHEL as well. That's now gone. People who migrated to CentOS 8 because they thought they were getting a decade of support - that's now gone.
So what are you arguing, that the second group somehow doesn't get it?
The part I don’t think people really get is that if your goal was to have a fork of RHEL that was as close as possible to RHEL itself in absolute value that CentOS Stream is much better than CentOS is/was. CentOS always tracked far behind RHEL and now CentOS Stream will track closely in front of RHEL.
And I only recall CentOS significantly trailing RHEL at the major version updates (e.g. 6 and 7). Other updates seem pretty timely, and the major version lag doesn't leave me vulnerable.
I can see this being useful for developers who are building something that needs to be compatible with the next major release of RHEL, but I'm not sure who else it will be useful for.
Unless you're the kind of person who pinned to a specific minor version of CentOS (which isn't the default and not supported for very long) you can use CentOS Stream exactly the same as you currently are and it will be a strict improvement for you. Bugfixes, security updates, and new features will come to you before they're either batched for release in the next minor version of RHEL or back-ported to the current supported releases.
Security fixes are not coming to CentOS Stream first. That's been in the announcement.
I'm sure they'll try not to break binary compatibility, but as it appears to be somewhat experimental and targeted to developers, breaking updates may occur. Isn't that the point of this distro -- so such testing can take place before updates are rolled into RHEL?
So, fine for a developer workstation, but I don't see how it can be stable enough to use in production.
RHEL requires expensive licenses. CentOS was RHEL without the RedHat branding and without the expensive licensing.
By design, there was a nearly complete overlap between RHEL and CentOS. By "repurposing" CentOS into a "rolling release", RedHat (IBM) has broken the overlap so CentOS (free licensing) no longer competes directly against RHEL (expensive licensing).
Previously, CentOS was a rebuild of RHEL. In between RHEL releases, CentOS was exactly the same as RHEL. When RHEL had a release/fix/backpoint, CentOS trailed until it was rebuilt from the new RHEL source.
The "old" CentOS was exactly the same nearly always (nearly perfect overlap) and the "new" CentOS is exactly the same nearly never (almost no overlap).
This change makes CentOS so much closer to RHEL that it’s weird that people are acting like the opposite is happening.
If the current RHEL release is 7.x then you can think of CentOS Stream as 7.(x+1). You don't have to worry about it suddenly being 8.0. Fedora plays the role of the future RHEL 8.0.