[BlueOnyx:23200] Re: Upcoming BlueOnyx 5210R additions

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Ernie,

> It's pretty sad that Centos can't keep up with RHEL releases.
> RedHat changed their release schedule to 6monthly but they are suppoting
> multiple versions at the same time. 8.1 has been available in beta since
> July 24th. and Centos havent done any work on 8.0 since the 7.7 code became
> available. It's a mess.

Yeah, and (according to a Reddit post) CentOS also had one of their lead
developers disappear for a few weeks because he went on a WoW binge. Go
figure. "Mess" doesn't start to describe that kind of cringe-drama.

> What's the fallback, use Fedora like BlueQuartz originally did?
> Fedora support cycle isn't very long, but they are the upstream for RHEL.
Fedora isn't really an option either, isn't it? It's lifetime cycle is
really uncomfortably short and you still can't do in-situ upgrades from
one major version to another without burning the barn down. If that were
possible it might be an option (not a good one, though), but it isn't.

When we start to look outside of the RedHat sithspawn-of-hell family the
list of available options for a suitable enterprise Linux or *NIX based
OS quickly collapses to less than a handful of options:

- Debian
- Ubuntu
- OpenBSD
- FreeBSD

None of them is RPM based, so our build architecture would need to be
adapted to spit out something other than RPMs. Which is doable, but
quite a pain.

If we say it must be RPM based, then these here might be options:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:RPM-based_Linux_distributions

But when you look at them in detail you'll see that it really boils down
to only three serious contenders and we already know we're not touching
the third on this list with a 10 foot pole:

- Mageia (fork of Mandriva)
- OpenMandriva (fork of Mandriva)
- Oracle (nope!)

Even Mageia and OpenMandriva aren't that suitable to us. Because the
thing is that we can't base BlueOnyx on some kind of exotic "I've never
heard of that!"-OS with mostly unknown, possibly dubious or short lived
history. Because we don't know if it'll still be around tomorrow, next
month or next year. Likewise many of us use some kind of third party
stuff here and there and if our favorite toys aren't available on
"ExoticOS 08/15", then we'll not be happy. It's also a hard sell if you
have to tell your clients the (dubious) benefits of some unheard of
"ExoticOS 08/15" if you yourself hardly know it well enough.

So it has to be one of the big names and we're back at the first list
shown above.

>From that list I'd directly ditch Ubuntu like a hot potato, though. It's
a great desktop OS and I've been using it for years on my office PC and
the Laptops. But for heavy duty datacenter stuff with preference on long
uptimes it not suitable.

The *BSD flavors are all great and I like them. Yet the switch from
CentOS to either OpenBSD or FreeBSD would be a hard sell, too. They're
different enough to cause you grief during the transition until you've
learned all the intricacies. And some of us use forms of virtualization
that wouldn't support a *BSD well enough to allow me to choose it. So
... that's not really an option either.

Long story short: I'll be using the downtime while we wait for CentOS 8
to explore doing a BlueOnyx port to Debian 10. I'll not say that there
*will* eventually be a BlueOnyx for Debian, but I'll give it a honest
and serious try as time permits it. Just to see if I can adapt our build
architecture to spit out *.deb's instead of RPM's.

Due to an ongoing support contract I've spent enough time around Debian
8, 9 and 10 to start to appreciate it. And the best part of it is
certainly that you *can* do in-situ upgrades. Did some Debian 8 -> 9 ->
10 upgrades recently and almost all went without a hitch for as long as
you hadn't tied them into too many exotic third party repositories.
Which is the other benefit of Debian: You can get sort of everything for
it from third party repositories.

However: As is CentOS 8 will still get priority treatment because I
don't want to rock the boat too much. But pursuing to solve the
technical obstacles that currently prevent us to do a Debian port might
be useful in the long run.

There is also another option which keeps floating around. At least on an
esoteric level. Call it a brain fart, if you will: With the prevalence
of virtualization we do have the option to decouple BlueOnyx from the
actual base OS, making it more or less OS agnostic (within limits). Like
stuffing it into a Docker image, a Snap or use Kubernetes. But: Docker
images or Snap images are like the box of chocolates that Forrest Gump
has on his lap on the park bench: "You never know what you get."

While there could be some merits to this approach: The whole idea
doesn't convince me.

TL;DR: We wait for CentOS 8 as it's still our prime contender. Meanwhile
I'll put up a Debian 10 "playground" to see if I can adapt the BlueOnyx
build environment to produce packages for Debian. If RedHat's hellspawn
eventually starts to stink much more than it already does? In that case
we then have the long term option to go for Debian instead.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber