Several comments as a long term RedHat production (pre-Fedora) and then
EL user -- on laptops, on workstations (including workstations for
scientific visualisation), and on compute and storage server "farms".
1. Ubuntu LTS serves essentially the same sector as EL, including SL
with some caveats concerning the existence of a list such as this. The
distrust for Canonical (the for-profit entity behind Ubuntu) because any
for-profit entity could behave as has IBM RH with the current EL
situation (debacle to us) is not applicable in so far as Ubuntu is a
port/repackaging with add-ons from Debian -- if Canonical does an IBM
RH, one can with relative ease switch to "pure non-profit" Debian.
Ubuntu, as with RHEL, and SL, has paid employee professional Staff
supporting the distro (albeit the SL staff mostly were re-packagers of
the RHEL distro source).
1.1 Conversion for laptops from SL to Ubuntu LTS was fairly
straightforward; detailed observations available upon request. As my
facility mostly (and wisely) is under pandemic shutdown, deployment on
servers is not yet done.
2. Reliance upon following the Fermilab/CERN HEP consortia may not be
feasible, even if Fermilab/CERN internally develop something akin to SL.
Although (most of) these entities operate upon pubic (government)
funding, they may not be required to release anything equivalent to SL
to those outside the consortia. SL was a boon to the community and
proven in the crucible of HEP (worldwide consortia).
3. As has been pointed out, there is no guarantee that IBM RH will
continue to make RHEL available in executable distro format licensed for
free for specific "small" users (under the Linux and GPL licenses, my
understanding is that source must be made available -- but whether such
source is feasible to build into an executable working distro is a
separate issue).
3.1 As has been pointed out, the IBM RH tool/s to convert from CentOS
(not SL) to the "equivalent" RHEL are not working as of the observation
from that correspondent.
As a practical matter, Ubuntu LTS (and presumably the underlying Debian
"equivalent") is kept more current than EL in terms of having "current"
versions of many applications. Thus, when I needed TexStudio current,
it could not be built for SL7 -- I have notes from this SL list to that
effect.
It will remain to be resolved what Fermilab/CERN/HEP will do going
forward (there may already have been consortia meetings in which the
matters have been resolved, but the consortia NDAs have prevented the
announcement as of yet). In some cases vendor obsolete hardware
evidently still must be put into use as the various science groups do
not have the funding to support hardware and personnel costs simply to
replace everything. Moreover, such groups may not have the experimental
schedule (specified scheduled runs at experimental facilities, such as
an accelerator/detector complex) to deploy (including testing) of new
hardware systems.
On 2/4/21 10:56 AM, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 4:58 PM Keith Lofstrom <kei...@kl-ic.com
<mailto:kei...@kl-ic.com>> wrote:
>
> So - who else is contemplating a move to Debian?
We will be following CERN and Fermilab's lead, whatever that is.
But the longer we go without knowing, the more uncomfortable we get.
Anybody have any inside information on their thinking?
- Pat
