Yes, sorry, unprecise terminology. When I say CoreOS I mean CoreOS Container Linux.
Fedora CoreOS is marketed to be a continuation. But it's not a seamless one, it requires manual porting. Detailed instructions don't exist yet, but the list is not that short https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/159. While most people won't be affected by many items, a couple of days are easily burned for understanding, coding and testing. Coding probably the smallest part, but if everything goes without "surprises" in real life, I would be surprised.
From what I've seen so far, it is a continuation in name only. Many of the things that made CoreOS nice have disappeared like locksmith, and other stuff has been made incompatible for no good reason, for example dropping docker...
This is generally one of the philosophical differences I see between the RHAT family of distributions and some others (those that I personally favor), that seamless upgrades are generally not well supported from each major version to next.
For example, and I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, and there are caveats; for years, I've maintained Debian and Ubuntu machines which I've used mostly staying inside of the bounds of the apt package manager, and since many years I've never had a need to question whether I could "dist-upgrade" from one release to the next. It just works.
It is a supported operation, and reliably so. At my current job, we use Amazon Linux, a distro which I understand to be mostly derived from CentOS with Amazon addons, (and I'm open to being corrected if anybody knows better, but...) one of the things we're coping with right now is that Amazon Linux 2 does not have an upgrade path from Amazon Linux 1. We are on the hook to rebuild those machines, it's a fact that has given us pause to seriously re-evaluate whether we want to stay on the same train, or get off and switch to another paradigm broadly.
I don't strongly see this as a decision that Amazon made, because I'm fairly sure it's also true that upgrades from eg CentOS 6 to 7 are unsupported. And CentOS apparently got this idea from RedHat Enterprise Linux upstream, which provides this helpful page locked behind paywall[1], but from above the fold you can tell at least one thing without logging in: there are only a limited set of cases where upgrades are supported, even with a paid subscription to RHEL.
usr1106|6 years ago
Fedora CoreOS is marketed to be a continuation. But it's not a seamless one, it requires manual porting. Detailed instructions don't exist yet, but the list is not that short https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/159. While most people won't be affected by many items, a couple of days are easily burned for understanding, coding and testing. Coding probably the smallest part, but if everything goes without "surprises" in real life, I would be surprised.
jhart99|6 years ago
yebyen|6 years ago
For example, and I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, and there are caveats; for years, I've maintained Debian and Ubuntu machines which I've used mostly staying inside of the bounds of the apt package manager, and since many years I've never had a need to question whether I could "dist-upgrade" from one release to the next. It just works.
It is a supported operation, and reliably so. At my current job, we use Amazon Linux, a distro which I understand to be mostly derived from CentOS with Amazon addons, (and I'm open to being corrected if anybody knows better, but...) one of the things we're coping with right now is that Amazon Linux 2 does not have an upgrade path from Amazon Linux 1. We are on the hook to rebuild those machines, it's a fact that has given us pause to seriously re-evaluate whether we want to stay on the same train, or get off and switch to another paradigm broadly.
I don't strongly see this as a decision that Amazon made, because I'm fairly sure it's also true that upgrades from eg CentOS 6 to 7 are unsupported. And CentOS apparently got this idea from RedHat Enterprise Linux upstream, which provides this helpful page locked behind paywall[1], but from above the fold you can tell at least one thing without logging in: there are only a limited set of cases where upgrades are supported, even with a paid subscription to RHEL.
[1]: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/637583
deogeo|6 years ago
Do you also shave all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves?