In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible
Honestly, I feel the 1:1 compatibility issue is overrated.
We want a stable distro that has ABI compatibility throughout the 5-10year support cycle, I don’t really care if it’s 1:1 compatible with RHEL.
For the niche or specific usecases where RHEL compatibility is needed, they offer their UBI container.In the past I did care more about it, because we were using specific Puppet modules and other provisioning tools that were validated against specific RHEL versions, but in the age of containerization it’s much less of an issue.
It might be an issue with certain ISO compliance, because we can’t just blindly throw a RHEL 8 CIS security benchmark script at a base Alma image anymore and expect everything to work fine. But it’s not a dealbreaker in my sector. We can reach compliance by making up our own benchmarks. The sectors that don’t have this luxury are probably already on RHEL for different reasons.
With what Rocky tried to do to remain 1:1 compatible with RHEL (Pretty much leaking and stealing the rpm sources) I’ll stay with Alma, even if they are no longer “bug compatible”.
Just waiting for Rocky to make a similar announcement.
They’re staying the course. tl;dr
One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered. We have validated this through OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers and it works exactly as expected.
Another method that we will leverage is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata. This is the easiest for us to scale as we can do all of this through CI pipelines, spinning up cloud images to obtain the sources via DNF, and post to our Git repositories automatically.
2020 was such a shit year in computing. So many things got killed off. CentOS, Windows 7, Flash, and Python 2.x, off the top of my head, and probably some other things as well.
I mean yeah, most of these things were getting long in the tooth, but they were widely used and it would’ve been nice if they were all supported longer.
