The Fermilab laboratory, which develops the Scientific Linux distribution, has announced the cessation of development for a new branch of the distribution. In the future, Fermilab's computer systems and those of other laboratories involved in the project will transition to CentOS 8. A new branch of Scientific Linux 8, based on the package base , will not be formed.
Instead of maintaining its own distribution, the developers at Fermilab intend to cooperate with CERN and other scientific organizations to enhance CentOS and transform it into a higher-quality platform for computing systems used in organizing high-energy physics experiments. Switching to CentOS will standardize the computing platform for scientific applications, simplifying collaboration on ongoing and future international projects involving various laboratories and institutes.
The resources freed up by delegating the maintenance of the distribution and infrastructure to the CentOS project can be redirected towards improving components that are specific to scientific applications. The transition from Scientific Linux to CentOS should not pose problems, as during the preparation of the Scientific Linux 6 branch, applications and additional drivers specific to scientific use were moved to external repositories and . As with CentOS, the differences between Scientific Linux and RHEL were mainly related to rebranding and cleaning up ties to Red Hat services.
The maintenance of existing branches of Scientific Linux 6.x and 7.x will continue unchanged, synchronously with the standard of RHEL 6.x and 7.x. Updates for Scientific Linux 6.x will continue to be released until November 30, 2020, while updates for the 7.x branch will continue until June 30, 2024.
Source: opennet.ru
