RHEL as a replacement for CentOS?

[anglican]

OK here is where I found it:

http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

Right, as a number of people have been discovering, the springdale website is not very up-to-date! However the distro itself is fully updated offering the latest versions of both 7 and 8 i.e 7.9 and 8.3 at the moment. Note that the numbering exactly matches RHEL versions. Personally I prefer an up-to-date distro to an up-to-date website

[MartinR]

Just to confirm what Anglican has said:

I've been running Springdale 8.3 in a VM since December. I've got DokuWiki and OwnCloud (both of which rely upon apache as a server) supported on it, along with the usual clutch of compilers.

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# cat system-release
Springdale Open Enterprise Linux release 8.3 (Modena)
# uname -a
Linux <redacted> 4.18.0-240.10.1.el8_3.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jan 4 10:51:33 EST 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and a little test script I have:

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$ Compilers
GNU Awk 4.2.1, API: 2.0 (GNU MPFR 3.1.6-p2, GNU MP 6.1.2)             [success]
gcc (GCC) 8.3.1 20191121 (Red Hat 8.3.1-5)                            [success]
cobc: command not found                                               [FAILURE]
g++ (GCC) 8.3.1 20191121 (Red Hat 8.3.1-5)                            [success]
GNU Fortran (GCC) 8.3.1 20191121 (Red Hat 8.3.1-5)                    [success]
GNU assembler version 2.30-79.el8                                     [success]
javac 1.8.0_275                                                       [success]
Lua 5.3.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2017 Lua.org, PUC-Rio                   [success]
This is perl 5, version 26, subversion 3 (v5.26.3) built for x86_64-l [success]
PHP 7.3.20 (cli) (built: Jul  7 2020 07:53:49) ( NTS )                [success]
plic: command not found                                               [FAILURE]
python: command not found                                             [FAILURE]
python2: command not found                                            [FAILURE]
Python 3.6.8                                                          [success]
ruby 2.6.3p62 (2019-04-16 revision 67580) [x86_64-linux]              [success]

FYI: the script uses the compiler's command to get the version, then compiles, links and runs a "Hello World" program.

[tunk]

Looks like Springdale is a bit faster with dot-updates as well:

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Ver RHEL       CentOS     Springdale
8.3 2020-11-03 2020-12-07 2020-12-01
8.2 2020-04-28 2020-06-15 2020-05-26
8.1 2019-11-05 2020-01-15 2019-12-16

7.9 2020-09-29 2020-11-12 2020-10-20
7.8 2020-03-30 2020-04-27 2020-04-14
7.7 2019-08-06 2019-09-17 2019-08-26
7.6 2018-10-30 2018-12-03 2018-11-14

RHEL and CentOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
Springdale: https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-announce

[desertcat]

Looks like Springdale is a bit faster with dot-updates as well:

Code: Select all

Ver RHEL       CentOS     Springdale
8.3 2020-11-03 2020-12-07 2020-12-01
8.2 2020-04-28 2020-06-15 2020-05-26
8.1 2019-11-05 2020-01-15 2019-12-16

7.9 2020-09-29 2020-11-12 2020-10-20
7.8 2020-03-30 2020-04-27 2020-04-14
7.7 2019-08-06 2019-09-17 2019-08-26
7.6 2018-10-30 2018-12-03 2018-11-14

RHEL and CentOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
Springdale: https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-announce

Ah!! Thanks for some clarity. Regardless, Springdale is on my short list of distros to kick the tires of. Can anyone tell me if Springdale 8.3 out or not?? All they say is TBD.

[jlehtone]

Can anyone tell me if Springdale 8.3 out or not??

anglican and tunk clearly said that Springdale Linux 8.3 is not only "out", but has been so longer than CentOS Linux 8.3.

What Springdale might lack is DVD image, but the content would not fit into DVD anyway.

[MartinR]

@desertcat, see the first code snippet in my previous.

[username]

@username: You optimist. Simple oneshot scripts that do not fault ...

Still with very few machines to migrate, it’s a bit tempting

Does someone knows if migrating a server from CentOS to RHEL does reinstall ALL the packages or only a few ?

I tried the Oracle script (hem... just to have a look how it works...) on a old CentOS 7 server and it gives the option to reinstall a few mandatory packages or all of them.

On the other hand, a distro-sync on Springdale repos seems to reinstall all the packages.

What about RHEL ? And does reinstalling all theses packages let you with dozens of rpmnew conf files to sdiff when the migration is completed ?

[anglican]

On the other hand, a distro-sync on Springdale repos seems to reinstall all the packages.

What about RHEL ? And does reinstalling all theses packages let you with dozens of rpmnew conf files to sdiff when the migration is completed ?

The distro-sync reinstall on Springdale did not leave behind dozens of rpmnew files when I tried it. No idea about a transition to RHEL.

[anglican]

Looks like Springdale is a bit faster with dot-updates as well:

Code: Select all

Ver RHEL       CentOS     Springdale
8.3 2020-11-03 2020-12-07 2020-12-01
8.2 2020-04-28 2020-06-15 2020-05-26
8.1 2019-11-05 2020-01-15 2019-12-16

7.9 2020-09-29 2020-11-12 2020-10-20
7.8 2020-03-30 2020-04-27 2020-04-14
7.7 2019-08-06 2019-09-17 2019-08-26
7.6 2018-10-30 2018-12-03 2018-11-14

RHEL and CentOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
Springdale: https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-announce

To be fair, this doesn't really compare like with like. The CentOS rebuild process is incredibly rigorous in terms of build order and library versions, it's much more than just a rebuild, usually involving a number of iterations to achieve the exact binary compatibility it claims. That doesn't mean that the Springdale rebuild isn't good, but it doesn't go through the same QA process that CentOS does. I guess the move to CentOS-stream will inevitably mean faster builds (no RHEL to check against). I wonder if it will mean RHEL then has to match CentOS builds?

[jlehtone]

... reinstalling all theses packages let you with dozens of rpmnew conf files to sdiff when the migration is completed ?

No idea. If a default config is copy of RHEL, then they would remain identical?
Quite many packages have moved to "Add your customizations to directory, not to file" setup.


Regardless, the Ansible/Chef/Puppet approach to not store (logical) config in the machine, but to apply it from outside becomes more and more cost-effective. With machine-actionable config at hand an install from scratch is suddenly quicker and cheaper than duct tape.