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by masklinn 2025 days ago
Isn't Fedora already the RHEL upstream? Why not just kill CentOS entirely?
2 comments
dralley 2025 days ago
No, Fedora and CentOS Stream are very very different.

Fedora is where new and shiny lands, with a release schedule of every 6 months, and ~1 year of support per version, with minimal backporting of bugfixes and frequent package updates. Lots of packages (including the kernel) update freely. That would not fly in CentOS.

CentOS Stream is the next minor version of RHEL. There is lots of backporting patches, ABI stability, the works. And it is supported for as long as RHEL is supported (the standard tier anyways) because it is the next minor version of RHEL.

For a visual metaphor:

Fedora ---------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL

The development process works basically like this:

1) A new RHEL release is created from a rough snapshot of Fedora. It's not an exact copy of Fedora, a fair number of changes are made in the process.

2) Fedora keeps moving forwards quickly, RHEL stays put

3) CentOS Stream takes the most current RHEL release and starts layering updates on top of that

4) After a couple of months these updates from CentOS Stream are then pushed into RHEL as a new point release

5) Repeat steps 3 and 4

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dralley 2025 days ago
Or to put it another way, Fedora is (roughly, with caveats) the upstream for new major releases of RHEL, but CentOS Stream is upstream for minor releases of RHEL.
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denimnerd42 2025 days ago
Centos is going to be a beta for the next point release. Fedora is like next major version but I’m not sure if they actually fork Fedora to get that or if they just use it to preview the technology.
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jolmg 2025 days ago
s/fork Fedora/fork RHEL/ I imagine you meant.
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denimnerd42 2025 days ago
Fork fedora to be the new rhel version. maybe there’s a technically better way of describing that.
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jolmg 2025 days ago
I see. I understood "they" to be "fedora", so I thought you said "fedora forks fedora" i.e. "fork fedora to be the new fedora version". So, I thought you meant "fork RHEL to be the new fedora version". I see that's backwards now.

EDIT: "Fedora is like next major version" also adds to the confusion. If Fedora is like the next major version of RHEL, it makes sense that Fedora forks RHEL and not the other way around.

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