CentOS will be useless as a replacement for RHEL. Without the guarantee of binary compatibility, any CentOS Stream update may break your locally installed applications.
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.
I replied to you in another thread but nonetheless CentOS Stream isn't going to break your binary compatibility for the same reason that RHEL 7.3 doesn't break binary compatibility with RHEL 7.2. CentOS Stream is spiritually always the next minor release of RHEL.
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.
>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.
They do specifically mention that some fixes may come to RHEL first.
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.
That's the whole point -- it's continually receiving updates that never break binary compatibility with existing apps/packages. For example, it's a safe target for vendors to target with binary packages, whereas CentOS stream won't be.
That's true of all RHEL major versions. You can safely target RHEL 6 or RHEL 7 without having to worry what minor version they might be running. The same will be true of CentOS Stream which is the upstream for the next minor release of RHEL. CentOS Stream isn't going to suddenly jump major versions.
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.
The RPM SPEC file in that repo will have a pointer to the actual upstream sources for the package. This is a typical scenario -- they are not re-hosting all of the sources to build a Linux distro, just the build steps needed to pull, patch, and build upstream sources.
So where do I actually get this upstream (RHEL8) source of say dracut? Because I was reacting to the comment "Red Hat publishes it's sources on https://git.centos.org. Those are then used to build CentOS Linux packages."
rpmbuild will download the sources listed in the spec file, apply the patches, and execute the build instructions to produce RPM and SRPM packages. The SRPM will contain the "as built" source tree.
I know someone who ended up hospitalized from accidentally taking two over-the-counter meds that both contained Tylenol. It just doesn't take that much to cause damage.
From what I've seen with older relatives, if you're able to stay mobile, you'll stay mobile longer and have a better quality of life. I don't think it's impossible to have housing and shops together and still have parking within a reasonable distance -- for example a town center with parking lots a couple blocks from the main street.
Personally I find paper wrapped items from the local deli fine, but I'd be pretty skeptical of any food products shipped only in paper -- too easy to contaminate.
