WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:09.420 Hey everyone, my name is Carl George, and I'm going to talk you here to see today is into 00:09.420 --> 00:14.160 us myth busters, who here seen the TV show or heard of the TV show myth busters before. 00:14.160 --> 00:17.000 Okay, it's probably why you hear it the talk, right? 00:17.000 --> 00:18.680 Good catch you title. 00:18.680 --> 00:20.680 Who's never seen the show before? 00:20.680 --> 00:21.680 A few people? 00:21.680 --> 00:22.680 Okay. 00:22.680 --> 00:31.760 Well, the actual real show was a TV show on the discovery channel from about 2003 to 2018. 00:31.760 --> 00:36.460 Those were experienced special effects engineers, and they would examine various like pop 00:36.460 --> 00:43.200 culture myths, and they would each rate each one as either busted, plausible, or confirmed. 00:43.200 --> 00:49.320 Today we're going to give the same treatment to myths about Sinto S. First one, you 00:49.320 --> 00:52.040 all probably heard this, Sinto S' dead. 00:52.040 --> 00:59.040 It's definitely not true, I wouldn't be here giving a talk about it if it was true. 00:59.040 --> 01:02.640 This myth was really common for a few years, thankfully I think it is starting to fade out 01:02.640 --> 01:07.640 I hear it less often, but even now some people will come up to be working a booth at 01:07.640 --> 01:12.480 a conference, typically a Sinto S or a Fidori and Sinto S booth, and asked me, I thought 01:12.480 --> 01:19.040 Sinto S was dead, and I'll turn around and look inside and say, no, we're here. 01:19.040 --> 01:23.480 But it is a narrative that's been pushed pretty hard by a few groups, so it's understandable 01:23.480 --> 01:24.760 that people would be confused. 01:24.760 --> 01:30.160 But let's dig into it and look at the facts. 01:30.160 --> 01:32.400 If you're looking at any software today, probably one of the first things you would do 01:32.400 --> 01:34.160 is go look at the website. 01:34.160 --> 01:38.160 It gives you a good pulse check of what's happening with the project, the number of updates 01:38.160 --> 01:39.160 they've done recently. 01:39.160 --> 01:41.880 It's kind of the project's presentation to the world. 01:41.880 --> 01:48.120 This is a screenshot of the Sinto S website yesterday, and you can see there that it's highlighting 01:48.120 --> 01:52.520 Sinto's stream as the distro, Sinto's hyper scale, special and just group, and Sinto 01:52.520 --> 01:58.800 is connect, which was an event we did earlier this week, as part of the Faust and Fringe. 01:58.800 --> 02:01.960 Throughout the year, other events will get highlighted here as well, sometimes we have 02:01.960 --> 02:07.240 a virtual Sinto showcase, we have one of those coming up this year, April. 02:07.240 --> 02:12.200 You'll see that updates and information for that on this website as we get no more information. 02:12.200 --> 02:17.320 But also linked to various other parts of the project and the documentation and community, 02:17.320 --> 02:21.960 one thing you'll find in there right now is the release notes for Sinto's Stream 10, which 02:21.960 --> 02:25.880 we launched a little more than a year ago. 02:25.880 --> 02:29.920 This current design of the website also was a refresh and new theme that we launched it 02:29.920 --> 02:34.440 out at the same time. 02:34.440 --> 02:40.000 So looking at that, we've got recent events, recent releases, and a recent redesign. 02:40.000 --> 02:42.760 Those all look to be signs of an active project to me. 02:42.840 --> 02:46.840 But let's look a little bit deeper, more in the technical side. 02:46.840 --> 02:51.400 Now, I don't expect you to be able to read this, but this is a screenshot of GitLab development 02:51.400 --> 02:55.480 for Sinto's Sinto's taking place in GitLab since 2021. 02:55.480 --> 02:59.320 I'll change this to the pretty much all changes to the distro happen via pull requests, whether 02:59.320 --> 03:01.520 you're a core maintainer or an external contributor. 03:01.520 --> 03:06.240 There's a whole lot of activity, so let's zoom in on those numbers. 03:06.240 --> 03:12.320 At the time, I took the screenshot over 47,000 merged pull requests. 03:12.320 --> 03:16.480 That's actually an outdated screenshot. 03:16.480 --> 03:19.480 I took this about a year ago, so there's much more now. 03:19.480 --> 03:23.760 When I went back to get a refresh screenshot for this talk, I realized that GitLab doesn't 03:23.760 --> 03:27.200 show the number there on that tab anymore, it just says 999 plus, so I couldn't actually 03:27.200 --> 03:28.200 refresh this. 03:28.200 --> 03:31.760 I'll have to find a new way to get that data in the future. 03:31.760 --> 03:36.640 That's only possible because in 2020 and 2021, we onboarded real maintainers into the Sinto's 03:36.640 --> 03:37.640 project. 03:37.640 --> 03:41.720 So we went from about four people working on the project, to about 2,000 people working 03:41.720 --> 03:47.640 on Sinto's, and to me that shows the project isn't just alive, but it's thriving. 03:47.640 --> 03:50.400 So based on that data, I'm going to call this myth busted. 03:50.400 --> 03:51.640 Sinto's is not dead. 03:51.640 --> 03:54.440 Now, I know it's something you all might be thinking. 03:54.440 --> 03:57.880 That Sinto's stream and Sinto's was a different project. 03:57.880 --> 04:01.160 And that's going to be our very next myth. 04:01.160 --> 04:03.760 That Sinto's stream is a different project. 04:03.760 --> 04:07.600 This is real common, but let's start by defining the official terms first. 04:07.600 --> 04:15.120 Officially, Sinto's is the project, and it's the same project that still exists, same 04:15.120 --> 04:16.120 board. 04:16.120 --> 04:20.720 The distro from the project was previously called Sinto's Linux. 04:20.720 --> 04:24.240 The distro from this project is now called Sinto's stream. 04:24.240 --> 04:27.360 Officially, we've said these are two separate distributions. 04:27.360 --> 04:31.640 Personally, my opinion is there are two variants of the same distribution. 04:31.640 --> 04:37.560 Originally, when it was released, Sinto's stream was just Sinto's Linux 8. 04:37.600 --> 04:40.120 With a slightly newer kernel release. 04:40.120 --> 04:42.480 They shared originally, they shared the same build system. 04:42.480 --> 04:46.160 That's no longer true, but originally, they were still in there, and I'd be able to 04:46.160 --> 04:50.480 tag builds just from one release to the next at the appropriate time. 04:50.480 --> 04:57.240 Once things got up to speed, Sinto's stream 8, still stayed about 85 to 90% of the same packages. 04:57.240 --> 05:02.840 Because that's about how far real changes in between its minor versions. 05:02.840 --> 05:07.320 Not officially, a lot of people, including myself, will just use Sinto's shorthand for 05:07.320 --> 05:09.800 the distro from the Sinto's project. 05:09.800 --> 05:11.600 That was true for Sinto's Linux. 05:11.600 --> 05:13.600 I think it's still true for Sinto's stream. 05:13.600 --> 05:16.440 Other people may disagree, but you'll see it really common. 05:16.440 --> 05:17.720 It's not just me pushing that. 05:17.720 --> 05:22.920 I'll see support requests and tickets and social media where people say, I'm running Sinto's 05:22.920 --> 05:23.920 10. 05:23.920 --> 05:26.960 There isn't a Sinto's Linux 10, but there's a Sinto's stream 10. 05:26.960 --> 05:32.720 So we know exactly what they mean. 05:32.720 --> 05:36.400 Regardless of the outputs of the project, the project never went away. 05:36.400 --> 05:40.320 There are a few key members that I'd like to highlight as well. 05:40.320 --> 05:44.680 Johnny Hughes, he was around since the very beginning of the project, and now he works in 05:44.680 --> 05:50.240 Sinto's release engineering, Fabian Ederton, who's sitting right here in the front row. 05:50.240 --> 05:52.640 He told me he joined in about 2006. 05:52.640 --> 05:57.440 He says his title is Floor Sweeper, but he actually works on Sinto's infrastructure. 05:57.440 --> 06:01.240 Brian Stinson, who might be in the room, he's definitely here at the conference. 06:01.240 --> 06:05.800 He joined the project in 2013, and he's now the real lead architect, which still his work 06:05.800 --> 06:11.480 is still heavily involved in Sinto's because of the nature of how things are set up now. 06:11.480 --> 06:14.440 These were the most prominent members of the project when I first started getting involved 06:14.440 --> 06:21.320 in 2017, and then later they became my teammates when I joined Redhead in 2019. 06:21.320 --> 06:23.000 Thankfully, these folks aren't alone anymore. 06:23.000 --> 06:27.640 Like I mentioned, there's a lot more people working on things. 06:27.640 --> 06:32.200 Based on the organizational structure, the outputs in the people, I'm going to call this one 06:32.200 --> 06:33.560 busted. 06:33.560 --> 06:38.280 Sinto's stream is still part of the same Sinto's project. 06:38.280 --> 06:43.640 Our next myth, Sinto's is two different from Rell. 06:43.640 --> 06:46.760 Some people will claim that it used to be the same, but now it's not anymore because of the 06:46.760 --> 06:49.440 changes we made with stream. 06:49.440 --> 06:52.760 Usually, you'll see people trying to make this claim when they're trying to convince themselves 06:52.760 --> 06:57.160 or other people not to use it, which is just mean, it's not really fair. 06:57.160 --> 07:01.640 So to examine this, let's look at how these distros are actually created now. 07:01.640 --> 07:03.640 This here's the legacy relationship. 07:03.640 --> 07:07.640 Photoroids, the actual role in Rell's, we'll get into that myth later. 07:07.640 --> 07:12.600 Photoroor releases come off of there every six months, and then in the past Redhead would pick 07:12.600 --> 07:17.400 one of those releases, not really talk about it, and develop it behind the firewall in private 07:17.400 --> 07:21.880 and create a new major version of Rell, eventually releasing a Rell minor version, like in this 07:21.880 --> 07:23.720 example here, Rell 7.0. 07:23.960 --> 07:29.000 Sinto's will come along and take that published sources and duplicate it, create another build, 07:29.000 --> 07:34.600 removing all the branding, and the idea was to match it as closely as possible. 07:35.400 --> 07:37.960 The term that was often used was bug for bug compatibility. 07:38.840 --> 07:43.960 That makes it a useful district that you can literally use, but the problem is that means you can't 07:43.960 --> 07:48.280 actually accept any contributions or fix any bugs yourself in the Sinto space. 07:48.280 --> 07:50.680 All of it just has to come through Rell and you get what you get. 07:51.320 --> 07:54.760 To me, that's less of an open source project and more of a science experiment, 07:54.760 --> 07:57.480 even though it is a something useful you can use in build on top of. 08:00.600 --> 08:04.200 If you went to contribute into Fedora, which was kind of the official stance at that time, 08:05.080 --> 08:11.080 you could get a contribution say into Fedora 23, but you couldn't get it into Rell 7 or Sinto 7. 08:11.080 --> 08:15.160 You had to wait until the next major version branch to even have it considered, which maybe 08:15.160 --> 08:22.600 years down the line. This is how we have things set up now. Still raw-hide and Fedora is 08:22.600 --> 08:25.800 released the set up the same way, but we do that branching in public. 08:27.000 --> 08:30.600 Fedora 40, we basically branched off. There's a little bit more detail to it than this, 08:30.600 --> 08:36.200 but this is the high level overview. Branched off Sinto's 10 in the public and did the initial bootstrap 08:36.200 --> 08:41.720 phase before we launched it and did the release announcement for Sinto's stream 10. Later on, 08:41.800 --> 08:47.480 Rell minor versions branched from there, and the actual minor versions become the certified product, 08:47.480 --> 08:50.600 and in that way Sinto's function is as the Rell major version branch. 08:54.040 --> 08:57.480 Because of the way it's set up now, we like to say, and if you went to the Connect Conference, 08:57.480 --> 09:01.000 you saw it on the land yard that Sinto's defines enterprise Linux. 09:05.560 --> 09:10.680 While doing all of that, we still must, Sinto's still must follow the Rell compatibility rules. 09:11.720 --> 09:15.080 If you look online, you can find this page, just call the application compatibility guide, 09:15.080 --> 09:20.360 these are literally those rules. And I'll cover what I'm talking about in more detail, 09:20.360 --> 09:24.600 and I have time to go through all of it. But the main thing is is that changes in Sinto's 09:24.600 --> 09:30.520 aren't just independent, and we just do in the minivacum, they affect Rell in the in the very near future. 09:31.080 --> 09:35.160 Changes aren't going to be made there that aren't decided to be appropriate for Rell customers in 09:35.240 --> 09:41.320 the very near future. And when you put it in that context, you wouldn't say that Rell 10.1 09:41.320 --> 09:48.680 is a completely different distro from 10.0. And likewise, Sinto's 10 isn't completely different from Rell 10. 09:48.680 --> 09:51.720 It functions like the major version branch, and so it's very similar. 09:54.840 --> 09:58.920 When you look at that branching model and the compatibility rules, I think it's easy to call this myth 09:58.920 --> 10:05.960 busted as well. Sinto's is built different now, but the resulting distro, it's not that different from Rell. 10:08.120 --> 10:12.120 And I have to bet this a minute ago, Sinto's a role in Rell 10 will be our next myth. 10:12.920 --> 10:17.080 The origin of this one is a little bit our own fault in the project, but let's talk about it. 10:18.840 --> 10:23.640 In the past Sinto's had major, major and minor versions, but now it's only a major version. 10:24.440 --> 10:29.800 The stream variant was originally announced as a rolling release. The idea people had was that they 10:29.800 --> 10:35.880 wanted to convey that it no longer had minor versions, and that it rolled from one minor version to the next. 10:36.440 --> 10:39.960 But that's not what Rell in Rell really means. That's just not having minor versions. 10:42.680 --> 10:47.320 If you think about what an actual Rell in Rell says with other distributions, that means there's no 10:47.320 --> 10:51.800 version at all, there's no end of life dates, you don't have to reinstall it, and there's a single channel of 10:51.800 --> 10:58.520 updates. Sinto's has major versions, each of those has its own update channel, and end of life date to go with it. 11:01.640 --> 11:06.360 So I think this was a terminology mistake, and to be fair, it was corrected pretty quickly. 11:06.360 --> 11:10.360 We realized it was causing confusion, took it down off the website, it was still in the release 11:10.360 --> 11:13.240 announcement, because you're not really going to go back and retroactively edit that. 11:14.840 --> 11:20.680 The term that we use now is continuously delivered. I'll be honest, I don't like this term either. 11:20.760 --> 11:23.240 It's kind of convoluted, and people don't really understand what it means. 11:24.440 --> 11:29.400 I'll just translate it as it gets updates, which is true for pretty much every Linux distribution. 11:33.560 --> 11:37.960 So regardless of those details, I think we have enough data to call this one, 11:37.960 --> 11:39.960 busted. Sinto's is not a role in Rellies. 11:42.680 --> 11:49.160 Our next myth, Sinto's is bleeding edge. This is an extension of that role in Relliesmith, because Rell 11:49.160 --> 11:52.920 in Relliesmith is typically do have the latest versions of software, as soon as they come out 11:52.920 --> 11:57.400 upstream from the upstream projects, because they don't have to wait for a new version to do an 11:57.400 --> 12:03.400 incompatible change. So let's look at Sinto's software. This one's actually really easy to 12:03.400 --> 12:08.760 disprove, just with the data. Sinto's 9, if you look at some of the major distro components that 12:08.760 --> 12:15.880 you would see, Colonel 514 from 2021, System D from 2022, G-Lib C from 2021. 12:16.680 --> 12:21.080 This is 4 to 6 year old software, and that's still a current version of the Sinto's project. 12:21.720 --> 12:27.160 Would you call 4 to 6 year old software bleeding edge? I wouldn't. And it's a similar story with 12:27.160 --> 12:33.480 Sinto's 10, although a little bit shifted in the future, most of that software came from 2024, time frame. 12:35.960 --> 12:39.000 And if you think back to our branching diagram, it makes perfect sense, because that's about 12:39.000 --> 12:45.320 when they branched from Fedora. Every once in a while, you'll see a version rebasing that initial bootstrap 12:45.320 --> 12:52.520 phase, and sometimes after it too, but a lot less common. One example I know that's upcoming 12:52.520 --> 12:58.440 that people might be looking forward to is Sinto's 10 initially released with 947. It's been 12:58.440 --> 13:05.400 rebased, most of the components to 949, and that's expected to show up in the next real minor 13:05.400 --> 13:11.720 version that's happening soon this year. So based on that, we'll call this one busted also. 13:11.720 --> 13:14.760 Just looking at the package versions, it's definitely not bleeding edge software. 13:18.040 --> 13:22.920 Then our next myth, Sinto's still an LTS. I'll admit this one's a little bit 13:22.920 --> 13:27.320 contrived, I didn't want all of the myths to just be busted conclusions, so I kind of inverted this one 13:27.320 --> 13:34.040 just to have a confirmed one, but I'm spoiling it for you. Sometimes I'll see the opposite version of this 13:34.040 --> 13:38.440 in the wild where people say it's not an LTS anymore, or I'll say it's an LTS, and people try to 13:38.440 --> 13:42.600 correct me, but let's look at the history of the term LTS to set the context. 13:43.800 --> 13:49.480 Canonical and Ubuntu pioneered this term in 2006 when they released Ubuntu 606 LTS Dapper Drake, 13:50.120 --> 13:56.360 and that was a 5-year life cycle. Since then, five plus years is kind of considered an LTS, 13:56.360 --> 14:01.880 and less than that is a short term release, or just a regular release. It's been emulated by 14:01.880 --> 14:07.640 other distros since then. Sinto's did use to match Rails 10-year life cycle, and with the 14:07.640 --> 14:12.120 stream changes, it did get reduced down to about five and a half years, but to me, if the term 14:12.120 --> 14:17.480 means five plus years, that's still an LTS, even if it's less than it used to be. So that one also 14:17.480 --> 14:21.720 makes it pretty easy just on the data to say confirmed that Sinto says still an LTS. 14:24.600 --> 14:28.920 Myth, you can't use Sinto's in production. This one's really fun, I'm going to go a little bit quicker, 14:28.920 --> 14:34.520 but this originated with a statement on the Red Hat website that said that it's a lot of words, 14:34.520 --> 14:38.200 but basically it says that Red Hat doesn't recommend Sinto's streaming production. 14:40.040 --> 14:45.160 The funny thing about that is that REL comes with promises, agreements, certifications, 14:45.160 --> 14:50.840 and services. The only thing Red Hat recommends for production is REL with support, 14:50.840 --> 14:55.400 and that with support part is interesting because if you go to the REL web store, 14:55.400 --> 15:00.200 you can actually go buy REL without support, and it also says it's not intended for production 15:00.200 --> 15:05.160 environments. So when you think about it in that context, Red Hat never endorsed the old 15:05.160 --> 15:08.600 variant Sinto's Linux, it doesn't endorse Sinto's stream, it doesn't endorse any other 15:08.600 --> 15:13.080 distro, and it doesn't even endorse REL without production, or without support, I mean. 15:17.800 --> 15:22.840 So other companies, besides just what recommendations are, let's look at actual companies using it. 15:23.720 --> 15:28.040 Unfortunately, I want to have one example of a company that's agreed to let us say their name. 15:28.360 --> 15:32.040 That's our friends in Mehta, they're very active in Sinto's special interest groups, 15:32.040 --> 15:37.000 and they let us know that yes, they run Sinto's stream on literally millions of servers in production, 15:37.000 --> 15:41.560 and it works really well for them. I have talked to other companies, engineers, 15:42.200 --> 15:46.200 and various industry, some of them are listed up there, where they've told me like, yeah, we stuck 15:46.200 --> 15:50.280 with it, and we like these changes, and we've even contributed, but please don't mention our name 15:50.280 --> 15:53.320 in any slide decks. I'm like, thank you. Trying to get more examples. 15:54.120 --> 15:59.480 But based on that, we can go ahead and say this one's busted as well. You definitely can use Sinto's 15:59.480 --> 16:03.480 in production, there's nothing that stops you, regardless of what Red Hat would like you to buy. 16:06.360 --> 16:11.080 Sinto's is untested, we'll be our next myth, and this one bugs me because it's discounting 16:11.080 --> 16:17.480 other people's work, which is pretty rude. Sinto's is tested at multiple levels, there's 16:17.480 --> 16:23.080 tests that happen when you open a poor request, there's also tests within the RPM spec file itself, 16:23.080 --> 16:26.360 if you're familiar with that, the checks section where it'll do tests from like the 16:26.360 --> 16:31.480 upstream unit test typically. And before our package is allowed in the Sinto's stream composed, 16:31.480 --> 16:36.600 like the collection of artifacts, it has to pass additional rail gating tests, and then once it 16:36.600 --> 16:41.480 isn't a compose, that compose has distribution level tests that it also has to pass before it's 16:41.480 --> 16:46.600 published out to the mirrors. So there's multiple levels and steps before updates can actually go out. 16:47.880 --> 16:50.920 Test aren't perfect, there's always some scenario people haven't thought of, 16:50.920 --> 16:55.160 including in rail, whenever something gets through a problem gets through that isn't covered by 16:55.160 --> 16:59.160 the test, that's the case to open it, start a new test case to catch that in the future. 17:00.360 --> 17:04.120 And the cool thing with the contribution model is now, you can contribute some of those tests 17:04.120 --> 17:07.800 also if it's a blind spot that Red Hat and Sinto aren't testing for. 17:10.600 --> 17:13.000 So it's definitely tested so that myth is busted as well. 17:15.160 --> 17:19.240 All right, last myth is pretty spicy, I'm probably out of time or have a minute left, 17:19.320 --> 17:24.440 but this one's good. The myth is that IBM forced the Sinto's changes. 17:25.480 --> 17:31.880 This one's just tinfoil hat territory. Unfortunately, a lot of people think it's true because of 17:31.880 --> 17:37.720 the timing of public things. This proving it's a little harder, it's like proving a negative. 17:37.720 --> 17:41.800 I'd rather the people claiming this actually provide some evidence, but that's not how, 17:41.800 --> 17:46.120 you know, the internet works. But I'll take a stab at a bust in this myth anyways. 17:46.120 --> 17:55.480 In 2014, Red Hat hired Sinto S core maintainers. Before this, Sinto wasn't really in great shape, 17:55.480 --> 18:00.040 the last major version before that was about eight months delayed. There's some burnout going on. 18:01.800 --> 18:08.360 Red Hat was doing some product development to, they were doing some product development, 18:08.360 --> 18:12.200 based on that, they wanted the project to be keep going. So they wanted to sustain it, 18:12.200 --> 18:21.640 they hired the engineers from 2016 to 2017. Do I have any Q&A time I can burn up? No Q&A time. 18:21.640 --> 18:28.120 Well, contribution model from 2016 to 2017 was being discussed. In 2018, IBM announced 18:28.120 --> 18:33.800 Sinto acquired, deal close in 2019, and September 2019 Sinto stream was announced. 18:33.800 --> 18:37.800 And even without all the past knowledge, I don't think anyone thinks a company's big 18:37.800 --> 18:43.480 IBM can make a change like this in two months. So let's call that one busted as well. 18:43.480 --> 18:47.880 The changes weren't driven by IBM. If you have questions coming up afterwards, again, I'm very 18:47.880 --> 18:51.320 sorry for being late. I didn't realize I couldn't get on the end on the other side of the building. 18:51.320 --> 19:02.840 So that's all, and thanks for coming to my talk.