Support for RHEL continues as CentOS8 will be discontinued

CentOS8 will be discontinued by RedHat but gempa continues to support RHEL and renamed it’s software repositories from centos to rhel.

The CentOS team recently announced the switch from CentOS to CentOS Streams:

• https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
• https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux

Therein the following end of life (EOL) dates are announced:

• CentOS 8: December 31, 2021
• CentOS 7: June 30th, 2024

As a consequence we do not recommend our customers to upgrade from CentOS 7 to 8 for now. Ultimately, there will be a successor of CentOS, e.g. Rocky Linux, which offers an upgrade path from CentOS. Also there are already RHEL compatible and free alternatives, with Oracle Linux being probably among the most suitable candidates.

gempa will continue to support RHEL 7, 8, and newer versions, as it is the current industry standard. However, we will not be able to support CentOS Streams because of it’s rolling release cycle and because it is not binary compatible to RHEL.

To clarify our support for RHEL we renamed gempa’s package directory structure and package file names from centos to rhel. For users of the gempa software manager (gsm) this change is transparent as gsm will automatically convert an existing configuration respectively detect a new CentOS installation to be a RHEL compatible distribution. For existing installations an uppdate of gsm is required. If gsm is not available, you may continue to upgrade SeisComP and all gempa module by downloading the software packages for RHEL 7 or 8 instead of CentOS 7 or 8, respectively.