The project AlmaLinux announced a change in its development strategy. The distribution will no longer be completely linked to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will now allow minor discrepancies in behavior, such as the use or absence of certain individual patches. However, the project will maintain binary compatibility at the ABI level, ensuring it can still be used as a replacement for RHEL.
The changes will have minimal impact on ordinary users of AlmaLinux. Applications compatible with RHEL will continue to work as before, and installed systems will receive updates to address vulnerabilities. The main changes will be seen in the package maintenance process. AlmaLinux will now accept error corrections that have not yet been incorporated into RHEL releases. Furthermore, AlmaLinux will allow the inclusion of errors that are not yet accepted in Upstream or pushed down to lower projects. The project will still report identified errors to Fedora and CentOS Stream Upstream projects, but no corrective actions will be taken in those projects.
This change has been prompted by Red Hat’s decision to stop publishing SRPM (Source RPM) packages in the public repository Git.centos.org. The only remaining public source of RHEL packages is the CentOS Stream repository. However, customers can still download SRPM packages through a restricted section of the website, subject to an additional user agreement (EULA) that prohibits data redistribution and the creation of derivative distributions using these packages. It is important to note that CentOS Stream is not fully synchronized with RHEL and sometimes the latest versions of packages do not coincide. While CentOS Stream usually develops ahead of RHEL, there may be delays in the updates of certain packages, such as the kernel.