And they are, in fact, planning to continue to use RHEL and/or AlmaLinux on their desktop and datacenter machines, even going so far as to adapt Fedora's build system to support building Debian packages[1] to leverage their existing RPM infrastructure.
As I understand it (from reading another article[2] posted on HN a few days ago), this change applies purely to the layer of machines that more or less directly interface with their experimental hardware, which has requirements more akin to industrial controllers than workstations or servers when it comes to the expectation of long service life with limited windows for scheduled maintenance.
I often think of Debian as a bit moldy from some changes over the years with legacy support (kludges?) in place, where it seemed more like an outdated Arch Linux at some point once it had switched to systemd.
But if I were CERN, I understand the choice of not getting involved with newer forks that aren't novel distributions you can trust to be around for the long haul. I would choose Debian as well in their place.
12 comments
[ 83.0 ms ] story [ 1432 ms ] threadSo the original commenter's questions stands IMO: why is Alma not considered a solution?
As I understand it (from reading another article[2] posted on HN a few days ago), this change applies purely to the layer of machines that more or less directly interface with their experimental hardware, which has requirements more akin to industrial controllers than workstations or servers when it comes to the expectation of long service life with limited windows for scheduled maintenance.
[1] https://gitlab.cern.ch/linuxsupport/rpms/koji-debian-plugin
[2] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1092512/0772b817c369632b/
But if I were CERN, I understand the choice of not getting involved with newer forks that aren't novel distributions you can trust to be around for the long haul. I would choose Debian as well in their place.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49562262