Re: CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu release cycles
* Stephan Lachnit:
> The more I started thinking about it, the more I wondered about why
> Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS are *not* binary-compatible.
They have different branching points from Debian unstable/upstream, so
they end up with different versions of the toolchain and core
libraries. Many of the core libraries offer backwards compatibility,
but no forward compatibility (unless their interface happens not to
change), so you have to build on system with the oldest libraries to
be compatible with multiple different distributions.
I'm not sure to what extent this is relevant to CentOS as released.
CentOS (Stream or not does not matter) is not a typical LTS
distribution: the change rate due to backporting and rebases is quite
high. For something that matches Debian stable, you need to look at
Extended Update Support (EUS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but that
has never been available through CentOS. Conversely, I don't think
there's an equivalent to mainline (non-EUS) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(or CentOS) in the Debian world. Debian's backports repository may
offer an approximation in some areas, but its scope is quite limited.
On the other hand, many CentOS users actually seem to want something
that is much closer to EUS than what they get from CentOS today, and
for them, Debian stable is probably a good fit.
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