CentOS - Jun 2020 - Blog article about the state of CentOS

Am 17.06.20 um 21:37 schrieb Noam Bernstein via CentOS:
>> On Jun 17, 2020, at 3:32 PM, Phil Perry <pperry at elrepo.org>
wrote:
>>
>> I get what you are saying, but what difference does it make if it has?
What does it matter if the lag is 1 week, or 1 month, or more? The only reason
it will matter to you is if you are trying to do something with CentOS that is
time critical - e.g, publicly facing server that needs security updates, using
CentOS on test servers to validate production releases for RHEL, etc. At which
point you probably should be using RHEL if it is important to you, not CentOS,
and it was a mistake to deploy CentOS in those roles in the first place.
> 
> And yet in practice many of us have found CentOS to be perfectly adequate
for such applications in the past, up to and including CentOS 7.  If this is no
longer true for CentOS 8, for whatever reason, it's useful to know.  I'm
not saying RHEL doesn't have its place - just that perhaps the boundary in
the range of applicability between it and CentOS has therefore also changed.
> 

The answer is not inherently in the distribution itself. Make your
analysis about your needs an requirements and the choice is then yours.

One could argue that the gap between disclosure of one security issues
and the update via RHEL subscription is to big. Then a contract with
the upstream developer of the corresponding software component is a
better choice then relying in RHEL, right?

--
Leon

> On Jun 17, 2020, at 3:46 PM, Leon Fauster via CentOS <centos at
centos.org> wrote:
> 
> The answer is not inherently in the distribution itself. Make your
> analysis about your needs an requirements and the choice is then yours.
> 
> One could argue that the gap between disclosure of one security issues
> and the update via RHEL subscription is to big. Then a contract with
> the upstream developer of the corresponding software component is a
> better choice then relying in RHEL, right?
Of course.   My only question is whether the observation that the gap for CentOS
8 is indeed larger than we have come to be used to for CentOS 7.  I'm
certainly not, and I don't think anyone is, claiming that the CentOS teams
owes us any particular response time.  I just want to know if the claim that
it's systematically significantly longer for 8 than 7 is in fact
(empirically) true.

						Noam

Once upon a time, Noam Bernstein <noam.bernstein at nrl.navy.mil>
said:
> Of course.   My only question is whether the observation that the gap for
CentOS 8 is indeed larger than we have come to be used to for CentOS 7.
So, I took a look... and the answer is "it's not" (with a small
sample
set).  I took dates from Wikipedia for RHEL and the archived release
notes for CentOS.  I didn't bother with the .0 releases (since that's a
lot of new work anyway).  Right now, CentOS 8 is far faster than CentOS
7 and 6 were at this stage.

release RHEL date       CentOS date     days
6.1     2011-05-19      2011-12-12      207
6.2     2011-12-06      2012-07-24      231
6.3     2012-05-20      2012-09-30      133
6.4     2013-02-21      2013-05-21      89
6.5     2013-11-21      2014-02-26      97
6.6     2014-10-13      2014-11-15      33
6.7     2015-07-22      2015-09-05      45
6.8     2016-05-10      2016-07-28      79
6.9     2017-03-21      2017-04-05      15
6.10    2018-06-19      2018-07-03      14

7.1     2015-03-05      2015-10-11      220
7.2     2015-11-19      2016-02-19      92
7.3     2016-11-03      2016-12-21      48
7.4     2017-08-01      2018-03-21      232
7.5     2018-04-10      2018-10-30      203
7.6     2018-10-30      2019-01-28      90
7.7     2019-08-06      (didn't find release notes)
7.8     2020-03-31      2020-04-27      27

8.1     2019-11-05      2020-01-15      71
8.2     2020-04-28      2020-06-15      48

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>