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

[Jörg Saßmannshausen]

Dear all,

maybe we should take that as an opportunity to gently move vendors in the 
direction to not only support rpm based but also deb based distributions?
In the end, if I really only can get hold of a rpm package, I still can use 
the Debian 'alien' command to convert it to a deb package. 

I agree with the Debian 'puristic' stance, I found that sometimes a bit 
irritating. However, since I really moved into HPC in 2010, I never had a 
problem with that on either Desktops or Cluster hardware. 
Problem as in: I did not manage to get it running at all. 

I guess your mileage will vary. 

All the best

Jörg

Am Dienstag, 8. Dezember 2020, 22:05:21 GMT schrieben Sie:
> > 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.
> 
> --
> #BlackLivesMatter
> ____
> 
> || \\UTGERS,  	 |---------------------------
*O*---------------------------
> ||
> ||_// the State	 |         Ryan Novosielski - novosirj at rutgers.edu
> ||
> || \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) ~*~ RBHS Campus
> || 
> ||  \\    of NJ	 | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB C630, Newark
> 
>      `'