CentOS sets up an "integration team" to help developers adapt to Linux distributions such as RHEL in advance.

CTOnews.com Sept. 22, CentOS Board of Directors has approved the establishment of a CentOS Integration Special interest Group (SIG) to assist those who build products and services on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or, in particular, its upstream CentOS Stream.

It is reported that the "integration task force" was proposed by Aleksandra Fedorova, a continuous integration (CI) engineer at RHEL of Red Hat. CTOnews.com learned after inquiry that the purpose of this group "is to verify that products and services built on RHEL or CentOS Stream can continue to run on CentOS Stream and the next RHEL version, and will not be interrupted by software package updates."

Because RHEL content is only available after release, RHEL-based services traditionally use the "catch-up integration model". Developers must update and release RHEL before they can adjust their products and services to run in the new release. Adapting to the new release not only costs a certain amount of development costs, but also takes up the support life cycle of RHEL.

▲ graphics source phoronix, while the "integration task force" is mainly to let developers know in advance the possible "product destructive changes" caused by the update of CentOS Stream or RHEL distribution, so that they can be better prepared. The team plans to identify a series of common problems, manage, develop and promote CentOS Stream's third-party CI, and develop integration toolkits.