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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never heard of the author before so I poked around their GitHub to understand if this is significant. Their account has many repos of Ansible roles, some with hundreds of stars like https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mysql

I’ve never used Ansible, can someone familiar with it tell us if this person is a cornerstone of the ecosystem or something?

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Jeff is both an open-source contributor, as well as a fairly popular YouTuber[1]. His more popular repositories are more beginner friendly and not supporting RHEL means that it's unlikely that new users may end up choosing it as their Distro-of-choice.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/jeffgeerling

Initially, before 2020, I would often build examples equally for CentOS and Debian (sometimes Ubuntu, if it was a more GUI-heavy thing).

After 2020, I slowed introducing CentOS examples, and converted all my CentOS usage to Rocky Linux.

At this point, I will not be creating any more examples building on RHEL-like OSes, but I might still maintain some of my examples on Rocky Linux, we'll see.

I'll second that commenter on your blog — thank you for taking a stance on this. This is much more likely to put some fire under Red Hat's asses than a bunch of no-names like myself whining on internet forums.

I doubt hobbyists would have chosen RHEL anyway though :) After all why pay when you can get excellent distros for free?

But those same hobbyists might eventually get a job at a place where they need to decide between Debian or RHEL, or influence the decision.

As a RHEL fan, using/preferring it since entering corporate environments forever ago -- I don't think new users are really a concern

They've done decently to lock down the sort of places that tell you what's being used, not chosen.

I say this with pain on my face, I don't want it going this way

To me, Jeff Geerling is the Raspberry Pi guy, since he pushes them in all kinds of crazy ways, like trying to get a high-end GPU working on a Pi.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/external-graphics-car...

That's interesting, to me he's the Ansible role guy. He has hundreds of roles, and I've used dozens for F500 clients on RHEL. Him moving away from it means RedHat in all likelyhood will have to pickup the slack and start creating hundreds of supported Ansible roles for RHEL OSes. Wonder if they'll release the source, or require the subscription level with Ansible/Tower to get access to them heh

I trust Jeff is making decent choices in his modules to support the distributions he's offering (including very similar derivatives)

By doing this, there's certainty that a lot of what's written will work just fine on RHEL. It's a huge Python library with the express purpose of abstracting away annoying OS quirks

CentOS Stream <-> RHEL is basically point releases. You're generally well past this stage by using Ansible.

At most you want to care about the OS family, treating the derivatives as part -- Debian, Red Hat, etc. Focusing mostly on binary/config file path quirks

There may be certain traits about RHEL users that will bring some issues

eg: more likely actually using SELinux, have forgotten to tend to their subscriptions, or are aiming for more strict compliance

Maybe not a _cornerstone_ per se, but Jeff's active in a number arenas (Ansible, Docker, general programming, ...) and has gained a level of name recognition. I think he's taking a reasonable stand here and contributing whatever weight his reputation carries to the discussion.

Jeff is probably the most famous "face" of Ansible, being a prolific contributor and a producer of learning content.

I don't know about now but he used to be. He basically wrote the first handful of Ansible books and maintains a ton of the roles people use.

Ironically Ansible (the company) was acquired by RedHat so Ansible is part of RedHat.

Yes, that's the point.

He's prominent, but cornerstone might be a bit much. It's almost as flooded as Python.

I know of him through his Ansible 'roles'. Definitely one of the few people I could name in the space. Note: roles are reusable sets of config tasks

Regarding the stance, I'm a little bewildered.

Some background on Ansible: the entire point of it is to reduce how much you care about the target OS... and he's supporting very-similar derivatives.

What little effort is required, will largely be there. Very rarely, dare I say never, do you care about point releases. Something silly is afoot if so.

Being selective with your modules deals with a considerable part the abstraction. For example, use 'package' instead of apt/dnf/something specific.

I write/test on Fedora, deploy to Ubuntu, and have been migrating to RHEL -- with no serious effort. Some dictionaries to hold different binary/config file paths.

Anyway, this is all to say - I see this as somewhat performative, but I don't disagree with it either.

I don't believe much will happen in the end. Good, bad, or otherwise.

The roles very likely will work in 'unsupported' land. Yet, the path IBM is taking with Red Hat is clear (while annoying)... and probably not changing

Calling it now, the majority of the incompatibility will be:

  - subscription-manager (which can/should be done before roles you get from others)
  - FIPS (a niche, where I would fully support the response being a support contract request)

Add a dash of irony (maybe?) because he's still supporting Red Hat indirectly by working with/on Ansible and close-enough environments.

He is the Pi guy.

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