We wanted to update you on what is happening, largely out of sight to most of the community, on the CentOS Linux 8 front. We have appreciated the patience of the community, but we understand that your patience won’t last forever.

A lot of the work in rebuilding RHEL sources into CentOS Linux is handled by automation scripts. Due to the changes between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, many of these scripts no longer work, and had to be fixed to reflect the new layout of the buildroot. This work has been largely completed, allowing us to pull the source from Red Hat without a lot of manual work. This, in turn, should make the process of rebuilding RHEL 8.2 go much more smoothly than RHEL 8.0 and 8.1 have done.

Once 8.1 has been released, work will begin on bringing this new codebase, along with CentOS Stream, in to CBS (https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CommunityBuildSystem) so that SIGs can build packages for CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Stream.

We will discuss this, and give updates of progress, on the centos-devel mailing list over the coming weeks. Some of you have observed that the CentOS team tends to prioritize doing the work over talking about it. While that’s not all bad, it does tend to leave most of you in the dark as to what it is that is being worked on, and we’re committed to greater transparency going forward.

Once again, we appreciate your patience as we work through the growing pains of the 8 branch. We hope to share a more detailed (projected) timeline in the days to come, with the caveat that timelines always change as they are being worked.