The generation of updates for the CentOS 8.x distribution has been stopped, which was replaced by the continuously updated edition of CentOS Stream. On January 31, content related to the CentOS 8 branch is planned to be removed from the mirrors and moved to the vault.centos.org archive.
CentOS Stream is positioned as an upstream project for RHEL, enabling third parties to control the preparation of RHEL packages, propose changes and influence decisions. Previously, a snapshot of one of the Fedora releases was used as the basis for a new RHEL branch, which was finalized and stabilized behind closed doors, without the ability to control the development progress and decisions made. During the development of RHEL 9, based on the Fedora 34 snapshot, with the participation of the community, the CentOS Stream 9 branch was formed, in which preparatory work is carried out and the basis for a new significant branch of RHEL is formed.
For CentOS Stream, the same updates are being published that are prepared for the yet to be released future RHEL interim release, and the main goal of the developers is to achieve a stability level of CentOS Stream identical to that of RHEL. Before a package is released to CentOS Stream, it goes through various automatic and manual testing systems, and is only published if its stability level is found to meet RHEL's quality standards for publish-ready packages. Simultaneously with CentOS Stream, prepared updates are placed in RHEL nightly builds.
Users are encouraged to migrate to CentOS Stream 8 by installing the centos-release-stream package ("dnf install centos-release-stream") and running the "dnf update" command. Alternatively, users can also switch to distributions that continued the development of the CentOS 8 branch:
- AlmaLinux (script for migration),
- Rocky Linux (migration script),
- VzLinux (migration script)
- Oracle Linux (migration script).
In addition, Red Hat has made it possible (migration script) to use RHEL free of charge in open source organizations and individual developer environments with up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru