[Beowulf] [External] RIP CentOS 8 [EXT]

[Ryan Novosielski]

> On Dec 8, 2020, at 4:59 PM, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 8 Dec 2020, at 21:52, Ryan Novosielski <novosirj at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> It’s pretty common that if something supports only one distribution, it’s RedHat-based. That’s also true of hardware vendors.
> 
> True, officially, but often not officially.  Again, back around 2008 I found it hilariously irritating.  HP supported a lot of Debian activity in the background, and hosted quite a lot of the infrastructure.   Officially, they only supported Red Hat, but I discovered on a visit to Colorado Springs that they actually developed all their drivers using Debian, and then ported them to Red Hat!
> 
> A year or two later, I remember noticing that the firmware update ISOs that HP distributed were also Debian-based.  Even though they only distributed Red Hat RPMs on them.  Duh!
> 
> Tim
> -- The Wellcome Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.

I should have been clearer too: this goes beyond just what they say they will support, or what sorts of commands they’ll ask you to run to prove a hardware problem, etc., but to your point, frequently stuff will be distributed only in RPM, or only yum repositories will be provided, or whatever else I might not be thinking of. And sure, I can work around that, etc., until one comes along that’s a huge pain in the neck for some reason, or it’s based on a different set of libraries, that don’t work well on the other distro, etc. There’s just a limit to how much time I want to spend on stuff like that, especially if we’re talking about stuff that really isn’t the focus of your business, like firmware or something. On my own equipment, I run either Debian or Ubuntu, and we do some Debian/Ubuntu in Singularity containers for the relatively few cases where they are supported and RHEL/CentOS are not.

That said, if CentOS truly goes away, isn’t seamlessly replaced, a lot of that could change.

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