On Feb 4, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Lamar Owen <lo...@pari.edu> wrote:
> 
> I posted a pretty complete rundown on the scientific linux users mailing 
> list, so I won't recap it all here.

Link?

> the transition was not any more difficult, really, than moving from CentOS 7 
> to CentOS 8.

That’s not my experience.

I keep several of my packages running on CentOS and Debian (and more) and I 
keep running into several common problems:

1. The package names are often different, and not always differing by an 
obvious translation rule.  For instance, it’s “openldap-devel” on CentOS but 
“libldap2-dev” on Debian, where the normal rule would make it 
“libopenldap-dev”.  Why the difference?  Dunno, but I have to track such things 
down when setting up scripts that do cross-distro builds.  If I automate that 
translation, now I’m setting myself up for a future breakage when the package 
names change again.  (libldap3-dev?)

2. Some packages simply won’t be available.  Most often this happens in the 
Debian → CentOS direction, but I’ve run into cases going the other way.  Just 
for one, I currently have to install NPM from source on Debian because the 
platform version won’t work properly with the platform version of Node, last 
time I tested it.  Why?  Same answer as above.

3. Debian adopted systemd, but it didn’t adopt the rest of the Red Hat userland 
tooling.  For instance, it’s firewalld on CentOS, UFW on Ubuntu, and raw kernel 
firewall manipulation on Debian unless you install one of those two.  And then, 
which?

4. Network configuration is almost entirely different unless you turn off all 
the automation on all platforms, in which case you might as well switch to 
macOS or FreeBSD for all the good your muscle memory and training will do you.

I’m not saying “don’t do it,” but to say it’s as smooth as from CentOS 7 to 8?  
Hard sell.

I’ll give you one mulligan: the changes to the security rules in CentOS 8 
caused a huge upheaval for one of my applications, since it basically stopped 
it from running, being naughty in Red Hat’s omnisciently beneficent eyes.  We 
spent about a year fixing breakages due to 25 years of built-up assumptions 
about what was correct and sensible, which don’t affect us on other Linuxes 
because they didn’t implement the same SELinux rules.

The details aren’t super-important, because the real take-away is this: it’s 
always *something.*

(For those that must know, the biggie was that our systemd-based service used 
to run from /home/$APPNAME but that’s a no-no on C8 now.  Moving it all under 
/opt/$APPNAME and rearranging it all according to LFS rules, then finding and 
fixing all the places we depended on such paths was *painful*.)
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