Do we have some folks in mind who would use this already? I'm interested in discussing this use-case with those who would use this actively.

I think this would eventually be quite useful for the Kmods SIG, among others.

I agree, the Kmods SIG will definitely want to build against RHEL kernels. (Speaking as co-chair of Kmods SIG)

I agree with @jsbillings that this might indeed be especially interesting for the Kmods SIG, but very likely for other SIGs as well. The Kmods SIG would use this actively. I say that despite me personally not operating any "non-stream" EL8 systems anymore and probably never running any non-stream EL9.

Currently some efforts are simply duplicated. E.g. the rocklinux community started rebuilding CentOS SIG content for EL8. The Kmods SIG is in a similar position: We plan to provide packages that are already provided by elrepo or kernel-plus for EL8, but not for EL8s. It makes more sense to join these efforts. The CentOS project, maintaining the upstream CentOS Stream, seems to be the natural place for such community efforts. I.e., SIGs can develop for CentOS Stream and "simply" rebuild their content for RHEL (and any other EL rebuild) once RHEL buildroots are available in CBS.

Hence for me it makes sense to make RHEL buildroots available in CBS. Of course there are many open questions how to handle this. E.g., would there also be a "CentOS Extras" repository that EL systems can consume to allow easy access to SIG content? Would these extras packages then be built in CBS as well?

Honestly, I never expected that this might even be an option and assumed that such a request would simply be rejected immediately. Which also means that I have not thought about this while setting up the Kmods SIG CBS tags. E.g. we are currently using disttag = el8 for cs8 which would obviously cause issues once we build our packages for non-stream el8 as well. Currently we do not have any packages released yet, hence I ask you @bstinson to please let me know asap whether you think this request has a real chance of being accepted or not.

Sorry that this post turned out to be a bit longer than I expected.

FWIW, here's Gunnar Hellekson and Mike McGrath giving their opinions on this in a public Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HfynkSPncg&t=1812s

FWIW, here's Gunnar Hellekson and Mike McGrath giving their opinions on this in a public Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HfynkSPncg&t=1812s

tl;dr (copied from youtube generated CC) "the answer from my point of view is yes"

Just to add that after discussion with @bstinson we started the technical work needed to make this happen. We'll just give it a try on test tags in cbs, once we'll have figured out all the mechanics, and when fully tested, we'll announce on centos-devel and how to "opt-in"

quick status update (as of $today) :

• machine that will be used as internal mirror for this was deployed
• subscription attached
• storage space dedicated
• content is now being pulled

remaining tasks:

• add external-repos in koji (after a quick test for a tag/buildroot in dev env first)
• announcing this as "opt-in" choice for SIG willing to continue to build for/against el8
• treating requests (through this tracker) to switch from centos8 to rhel8 repositories

I gave a quick try on a cbs.dev instance and was able to convert existing tags to use rhel8 instead of centos8 and --scratch builds were working fine.
Closing this request as done as underlying work is now ready and rhel8 repos available for cbs build environment.

We'll just announce it on the centos-devel list and each SIG can request through ticket to "convert" their existing tag to use rhel8 when centos8 will disappear

cbs list-external-repos|grep rhel8
rhel8-baseos              http://mirror1.rdu2.centos.org/RHEL/8/baseos/$arch/os/
rhel8-crb                 http://mirror1.rdu2.centos.org/RHEL/8/crb/$arch/os/
rhel8-appstream           http://mirror1.rdu2.centos.org/RHEL/8/appstream/$arch/os/
rhel8-ha                  http://mirror1.rdu2.centos.org/RHEL/8/highavailability/$arch/os/