On 2/5/21 3:59 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
I respectfully disagree. There is *NO* RPM EL that does not originate
with a corporate for-profit overlord
That is correct; all EL rebuilds are dependent upon RH continuing to act
in good faith. If I'm going to switch from one EL rebuild to another
because RH decided to no longer sponsor the first one, then I'm setting
myself up for a repeat performance; I have no idea if RH will continue
to act in good faith or not, while I would like to believe that they
will, they don't have to. But if they don't: that is, if they were to
decide to stop distributing source RPMS for those package which are not
under a copyleft-style license like GPL and LGPL there is no recourse
for the rebuilds. Have you ever wondered why there are no rebuilds of
the Enterprise SuSE distributions? (at least I've not ever seen one; I
would love to be proven wrong on this point) Go look for publicly
available source RPMs for SLES or SLED, and no, OpenSuSE does not
contain them (that's like saying Fedora contains RHEL source RPMs).
(Having said that, I have not personally looked for some time, but the
last I checked to get SLES/SLED sources you had to have a subscription).
...Ubuntu LTS is has Canonical as the for-profit corporate overlord --
but Ubuntu is a port of a non-for-profit distro, namely Debian. If
Canonical decides to diverge from Debian, anyone using Ubuntu can
switch to Debian with little work. ...
Why not just go to the Debian source to begin with, then? Canonical has
so far operated in good faith with its distributions, but just like with
RH they could decide to no longer release binaries or sources that are
not copyleft-style licensed and restrict distribution outside of
subscribers. (They are NOT likely to do this; the backlash would be
huge!) Rebuilding a full distribution with only copyleft-style licensed
packages is going to be hard.
Going to Debian minimizes certain risk factors. You can also relatively
easily use content from PPAs; track the highest Ubuntu version closest
to you Debian version (eoan for Buster), add the source 'deb-src' to
your sources.list of in sources.list.d, make sure you have the required
tools installed, do a standard apt update, and run, as a normal user and
not root, the command
apt source --build $package_name
Satisfy the build dependencies (just like an rpmbuild --rebuild run) and
then install the resulting package with
apt install ./$package_file.deb
Yes, I would have preferred to just have stayed put with CentOS 8. But
not going to happen, unfortunately. And I haven't finalized my
decision, either; I have time to evaluate, and I'm going to use that
time to evaluate all of my options and then decide which is best for my
use cases, both at $dayjob and personally. I'll decide $dayjob first,
and then I'll use whatever I decide for $dayjob on my personal
machines. Just like I did with CentOS years ago.
