The CentOS Board of Directors has approved the formation of the CentOS Integration Special Interest Group (SIG) to assist those building products and services on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or specifically its upstream CentOS Stream. Aleksandra Fedorova, a continuous integration (CI) engineer at RHEL at Red Hat, proposed the formation of an integration task force. In her proposal, she stated:
Integration is about verifying that products and services built on RHEL or CentOSStream can continue to run on CentOSStream and the next RHEL version without interruption due to package updates.
Because RHEL content is only available after release, RHEL-based services have traditionally used a catch-up integration model: people have to adapt their products and services to run on the new RHEL after an update is released. Tuning services takes time and consumes the supported RHEL life cycle. This also reduces our options for dealing with breaking changes.
CentOSStream provides a way to achieve proactive integration: you can integrate changes early in the development process, before changes are sent to CentOSStream or RHEL repositories. This way we can prevent or at least be better prepared for any breaking changes that may be released via CentOS Stream or RHEL updates.
Provides a shared space for developing and maintaining tools and knowledge base for collaborative gating and testing of CentOSStream updates before they are released to CentOS images. This includes package-level and component-level integration.
The group plans to identify common issues in integration, manage/develop/promote third-party CI for CentOSStream, and develop an integration toolkit.
At a CentOS board meeting this month, the SIG was given the go-ahead to continue its creation. We will wait and see how CentOS IntegrationSIG develops in the coming months.
Access the full text of the proposal:
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2023-August/143077.html