Thank you for the "official" announcement and clarification, even
without a final date for a decision.
If I have not misread what is stated below, I take away three major points:
1. The HEP community (typically, transnational collaborations with local
national funding for those groups not directly "employed" by CERN) needs
a stable (and presumably "hardened") software environment -- constant
change makes multi-year experiments difficult to say the least.
2. Fermilab/CERN do not want to invest in SL 8 (or SL 9) presumably
because of the technical staffing required and the cost thereof, for
such staff could be working on other Fermilab/CERN activities.
3. Assuming that the community EL clones (Alma? Rocky? Springdale? ...
) are not satisfactory (including the level of technical expertise and
support that SL clearly has from the internal Fermilab/CERN groups), it
is probably less costly for HEP to get an academic license from IBM RH
for EL than to divert/add human technical staff to develop and deploy
SL8, SL9, etc.
Two small questions to Bonnie or others in the current HEP community
collaborations (I am not):
A. If the decision is to license IBM RHEL, will each institution / group
that participates in the relevant HEP community be expected to pay for
the license or fraction of use from the license pool, or will
Fermilab/CERN go to their respective funding sources and get a blanket
paid license for all? Depending upon the license cost and any
restrictions on the specific EULA/s, this could be a cost that the
smaller university groups (sub-sub-groups within some of the HEP
collaborations) might find significant.
B. Those of us who could "piggy-back" from HEP for SL will no longer be
able to do so if (A) is the route decided upon. Irrespective of the
route forward (licensed for fee from IBM RH, community, whatever), will
this SL list (perhaps re-named) still exist so that those of us who are
not able to get internal HEP collaboration, etc, communications will
still be able to exchange information and assistance?
I mention (B) because the lists I have tried to date for the "community"
distros are more or less all the same as "Ask Ubuntu" and not nearly as
useful as this list is/was.
On 5/6/21 1:42 PM, Bonnie King wrote:
Hi All,
Here is the official statement from CERN and Fermilab regarding CentOS Stream:
“CERN and Fermilab have been evaluating a number of options in view of the
sudden change of end of life of CentOS Linux 8 in December 2020 and the move to
Stream. A migration path for servers already running CentOS Linux 8 is being
provided to CentOS Stream 8 for those needing this release and latest features.
Continued support for existing workloads on Scientific Linux 7 and CentOS 7
will be maintained as previously planned. We are evaluating a number of
scenarios for future Linux distributions such as community editions or academic
licence options over the next 12 months as the shorter Stream lifecycle is not
compatible with a number of use cases for the scientific program of the
worldwide particle physics community”
- The Scientific Linux Team
