Dear CentOS enthusiast,

As in most years, May was extremely busy.

The Status of CentOS 8

We'll start with the question that appears to be on everyone's mind.

As you may know by this point, on May 7th, at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. You can read the full announcement on the Red Hat Developer Blog.

Since CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL, you can expect that the release of RHEL 8 will lead to the release of CentOS 8. And, of course, the most frequent question we received at Red Hat Summit, in the CentOS booth, was "when is CentOS 8 coming out?"

We don't have a definitive answer to this, because, especially with a new major release, there can be unforeseen complications. However, historically, a RHEL release is typically followed by the CentOS release within one or two months, so you can probably expect that general timeline.

We've also put up a wiki page that will track the day-to-day status of the rebuild effort. We ask that you follow that page, rather than asking on the mailing list for daily updates, and we will endeavor to keep that page current with daily changes in status.

Releases and updates

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0

In May at the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This, in turn, triggered the start of the process to build CentOS 8. This is discussed in more detail in the news item above.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during May:

Wed May 15 2019: CEEA-2019:1212 CentOS 6 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023304.html

Wed May 15 2019: CEEA-2019:1210 CentOS 7 microcode_ctl Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023311.html

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during May:

Mon May 13 2019: CESA-2019:1024 Important CentOS 7 flatpak Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023300.html

Mon May 13 2019: CESA-2019:1017 Important CentOS 7 ghostscript Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023301.html

Mon May 13 2019: CESA-2019:1022 Important CentOS 7 python-jinja2 Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023303.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1181 Important CentOS 6 qemu-kvm Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023307.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1180 Important CentOS 6 libvirt Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023308.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1169 Important CentOS 6 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023309.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1131 Important CentOS 7 freeradius Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023310.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1178 Important CentOS 7 qemu-kvm Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023312.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1177 Important CentOS 7 libvirt Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023313.html

Wed May 15 2019: CESA-2019:1168 Important CentOS 7 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023314.html

Tue May 21 2019: CESA-2019:1235 Important CentOS 7 ruby Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023315.html

Tue May 21 2019: CESA-2019:1228 Important CentOS 7 wget Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023316.html

Wed May 29 2019: CESA-2019:1265 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023317.html

Wed May 29 2019: CESA-2019:1267 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023318.html

Wed May 29 2019: CESA-2019:1264 Important CentOS 7 libvirt Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023319.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during May:

Mon May 13 2019: CEBA-2019:1015 CentOS 7 glibc BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023302.html

Wed May 15 2019: CEBA-2019:1227 CentOS 6 spice-vdagent BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023305.html

Wed May 15 2019: CEBA-2019:1226 CentOS 6 oracleasm BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023306.html

Other Announcements

The following announcements also happened during May:

Wed May 1 2019: IRC Meeting Changes - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023298.html

Thu May 9 2019: CentOS 8.0.1905 build status - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2019-May/023299.html

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.

We have the following SIG reports this month:

CentOS Opstools SIG Quarterly Report Mar 01, 2019 - May 31 2019 Purpose provide tools and, documentation, recommendations and best practices

for operators of large infrastructure. Membership update The past state still continues, we are not attracting new contributors. Health and Activity CentOS opstools packages are being consumed by OpenStack Kolla, and

at the same time, for example also by oVirt. For the future, we are removing messaging-related packages over

to the CentOS messaging SIG. Issues for the Board None at this point, but we should keep an eye on contributors.

Scientific SIG

In recent months, the Scientific Linux project announced that they would discontinue their work and move to CentOS 8 for the future. As a result, there are discussions happening about forming a Scientific SIG to continue their work under the CentOS umbrella. You should see more about this on the centos-devel mailing list in the coming weeks.

Events

As we've mentioned in the past two newsletters, in April we had the CentOS Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs, Tennessee. I'll bring it up one last time to mention that the videos from the event - the full presentations, and interviews with several of the presenters - are now on our YouTube channel. There's a great presentation from John Turner, talking about what work ORNL does with their supercomputers (running CentOS and RHEL!), and that's a good place to start.

Then, in May, many CentOS community members congregated at Red Hat Summit in Boston. After the RHEL 8 release was announced, Jim Perrin addressed a crowd of people who had questions about what changes are coming for CentOS 8. Questions ranged from timing (addressed elsewhere in this newsletter) to questions about issues raised in the recent post on the Red Hat blog about experimenting with newer functionality in CentOS before it hits RHEL. We're looking forward to the coming year, and how you, our users, will be able to contribute to this process. We also want to hear your thoughts on what this future might look like.

There are still a number of events coming up this year where you can meet and interact with the CentOS community.

I'd particularly like to highlight, again, the CentOS Dojo at DevConf.US in Boston, August 18th. We now have a tentative schedule, but there's probably room for another presentation or two, if you're going to be in the area and have something to share. Based on feedback last year, we've added a lightning talks section, where you can give 5-10 minute presentations on what you've been working on. And we'll have Jim Perrin talking about what's happening around CentOS 8, which will presumably be released by that time. We hope to see you there!

If you're interested in hosting a Dojo at your organization or business, please get in touch with me, at rbowen@centosproject.org, with your proposed event.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

Tell us what you're working on

Provide a report from the SIG on which you participate

Tell us about an event that you attended where there was CentOS content

Write an article on an interesting person or topic

Tell us about a news article that covered the use of CentOS in an interesting way

Suggest an topic that you'd like to see someone else write an article on

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.