Over the past few weeks we've gotten questions on various forums - email, Twitter, IRC, and so on - about why there are no mentions of CentOS 8 updates, or CentOS Stream updates, on the centos-announce mailing list.

For those not familiar, centos-announce is were we tell you about security and bugfix updates that have been released. And, if you look at the archives, you'll notice that everything refers to CentOS 6 and CentOS 7.

This is not because nothing's happening with CentOS 8 or CentOS Stream. It has more to do with the tooling that generates those mailing list posts, which is all automated.

As was discussed in this blog post, many of the scripts that work fine with 6 and 7 don't work with the new 8 flow, and one of those is the script that produces the mailings that go to centos-announce. And with everything else that the team has been working on, it just hasn't (yet) been a priority to fix that.

This doesn't mean, however, that you have to fly blind. There is a service that lists all of the new packages that are flowing - what's in them, and what was changed. That service is feeds.centos.org and it provides RSS feeds of what's been updated.

A typical entry might look like:

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:44:39 GMT: ppp-2.4.7-26.el8_1.x86_64

ppp - The Point-to-Point Protocol daemon

The ppp package contains the PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) daemon and
documentation for PPP support. The PPP protocol provides a method for
transmitting datagrams over serial point-to-point links. PPP is
usually used to dial in to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) or other
organization over a modem and phone line.

Change Log:

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 GMT - Jaroslav Škarvada <jskarvad@redhat.com> - 2.4.7-26
- Fixed buffer overflow in the eap_request and eap_response functions
  Resolves: CVE-2020-8597

Tue, 04 Dec 2018 GMT - Jaroslav Škarvada <jskarvad@redhat.com> - 2.4.7-25
- Fixed some issues found by coverity scan
  Resolves: rhbz#1602665

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 GMT - Jaroslav Škarvada <jskarvad@redhat.com> - 2.4.7-24
- Split out the network-scripts
  Resolves: rhbz#1608377

...

It shows what was updated, and a few of the most recent changes to that package.

Each repo that we're pushing content to has its own RSS feed.

For those of you who don't enjoy reading raw RSS files (and, really, who does?) I've written a little bit of python for my own convenience, which you're welcome to use. This script - https://github.com/rbowen/centos-community-tools/blob/master/scripts/rss_updates.py - parses all of those RSS files (comment out the ones you don't care about) and tells you what changed since the last time you looked at it. Output is captured in text and html formats for your perusal.