Hey everyone, my name is Carl George, and I'm going to talk you here to see today is into
us myth busters, who here seen the TV show or heard of the TV show myth busters before.
Okay, it's probably why you hear it the talk, right?
Good catch you title.
Who's never seen the show before?
A few people?
Okay.
Well, the actual real show was a TV show on the discovery channel from about 2003 to 2018.
Those were experienced special effects engineers, and they would examine various like pop
culture myths, and they would each rate each one as either busted, plausible, or confirmed.
Today we're going to give the same treatment to myths about Sinto S. First one, you
all probably heard this, Sinto S' dead.
It's definitely not true, I wouldn't be here giving a talk about it if it was true.
This myth was really common for a few years, thankfully I think it is starting to fade out
I hear it less often, but even now some people will come up to be working a booth at
a conference, typically a Sinto S or a Fidori and Sinto S booth, and asked me, I thought
Sinto S was dead, and I'll turn around and look inside and say, no, we're here.
But it is a narrative that's been pushed pretty hard by a few groups, so it's understandable
that people would be confused.
But let's dig into it and look at the facts.
If you're looking at any software today, probably one of the first things you would do
is go look at the website.
It gives you a good pulse check of what's happening with the project, the number of updates
they've done recently.
It's kind of the project's presentation to the world.
This is a screenshot of the Sinto S website yesterday, and you can see there that it's highlighting
Sinto's stream as the distro, Sinto's hyper scale, special and just group, and Sinto
is connect, which was an event we did earlier this week, as part of the Faust and Fringe.
Throughout the year, other events will get highlighted here as well, sometimes we have
a virtual Sinto showcase, we have one of those coming up this year, April.
You'll see that updates and information for that on this website as we get no more information.
But also linked to various other parts of the project and the documentation and community,
one thing you'll find in there right now is the release notes for Sinto's Stream 10, which
we launched a little more than a year ago.
This current design of the website also was a refresh and new theme that we launched it
out at the same time.
So looking at that, we've got recent events, recent releases, and a recent redesign.
Those all look to be signs of an active project to me.
But let's look a little bit deeper, more in the technical side.
Now, I don't expect you to be able to read this, but this is a screenshot of GitLab development
for Sinto's Sinto's taking place in GitLab since 2021.
I'll change this to the pretty much all changes to the distro happen via pull requests, whether
you're a core maintainer or an external contributor.
There's a whole lot of activity, so let's zoom in on those numbers.
At the time, I took the screenshot over 47,000 merged pull requests.
That's actually an outdated screenshot.
I took this about a year ago, so there's much more now.
When I went back to get a refresh screenshot for this talk, I realized that GitLab doesn't
show the number there on that tab anymore, it just says 999 plus, so I couldn't actually
refresh this.
I'll have to find a new way to get that data in the future.
That's only possible because in 2020 and 2021, we onboarded real maintainers into the Sinto's
project.
So we went from about four people working on the project, to about 2,000 people working
on Sinto's, and to me that shows the project isn't just alive, but it's thriving.
So based on that data, I'm going to call this myth busted.
Sinto's is not dead.
Now, I know it's something you all might be thinking.
That Sinto's stream and Sinto's was a different project.
And that's going to be our very next myth.
That Sinto's stream is a different project.
This is real common, but let's start by defining the official terms first.
Officially, Sinto's is the project, and it's the same project that still exists, same
board.
The distro from the project was previously called Sinto's Linux.
The distro from this project is now called Sinto's stream.
Officially, we've said these are two separate distributions.
Personally, my opinion is there are two variants of the same distribution.
Originally, when it was released, Sinto's stream was just Sinto's Linux 8.
With a slightly newer kernel release.
They shared originally, they shared the same build system.
That's no longer true, but originally, they were still in there, and I'd be able to
tag builds just from one release to the next at the appropriate time.
Once things got up to speed, Sinto's stream 8, still stayed about 85 to 90% of the same packages.
Because that's about how far real changes in between its minor versions.
Not officially, a lot of people, including myself, will just use Sinto's shorthand for
the distro from the Sinto's project.
That was true for Sinto's Linux.
I think it's still true for Sinto's stream.
Other people may disagree, but you'll see it really common.
It's not just me pushing that.
I'll see support requests and tickets and social media where people say, I'm running Sinto's
10.
There isn't a Sinto's Linux 10, but there's a Sinto's stream 10.
So we know exactly what they mean.
Regardless of the outputs of the project, the project never went away.
There are a few key members that I'd like to highlight as well.
Johnny Hughes, he was around since the very beginning of the project, and now he works in
Sinto's release engineering, Fabian Ederton, who's sitting right here in the front row.
He told me he joined in about 2006.
He says his title is Floor Sweeper, but he actually works on Sinto's infrastructure.
Brian Stinson, who might be in the room, he's definitely here at the conference.
He joined the project in 2013, and he's now the real lead architect, which still his work
is still heavily involved in Sinto's because of the nature of how things are set up now.
These were the most prominent members of the project when I first started getting involved
in 2017, and then later they became my teammates when I joined Redhead in 2019.
Thankfully, these folks aren't alone anymore.
Like I mentioned, there's a lot more people working on things.
Based on the organizational structure, the outputs in the people, I'm going to call this one
busted.
Sinto's stream is still part of the same Sinto's project.
Our next myth, Sinto's is two different from Rell.
Some people will claim that it used to be the same, but now it's not anymore because of the
changes we made with stream.
Usually, you'll see people trying to make this claim when they're trying to convince themselves
or other people not to use it, which is just mean, it's not really fair.
So to examine this, let's look at how these distros are actually created now.
This here's the legacy relationship.
Photoroids, the actual role in Rell's, we'll get into that myth later.
Photoroor releases come off of there every six months, and then in the past Redhead would pick
one of those releases, not really talk about it, and develop it behind the firewall in private
and create a new major version of Rell, eventually releasing a Rell minor version, like in this
example here, Rell 7.0.
Sinto's will come along and take that published sources and duplicate it, create another build,
removing all the branding, and the idea was to match it as closely as possible.
The term that was often used was bug for bug compatibility.
That makes it a useful district that you can literally use, but the problem is that means you can't
actually accept any contributions or fix any bugs yourself in the Sinto space.
All of it just has to come through Rell and you get what you get.
To me, that's less of an open source project and more of a science experiment,
even though it is a something useful you can use in build on top of.
If you went to contribute into Fedora, which was kind of the official stance at that time,
you could get a contribution say into Fedora 23, but you couldn't get it into Rell 7 or Sinto 7.
You had to wait until the next major version branch to even have it considered, which maybe
years down the line. This is how we have things set up now. Still raw-hide and Fedora is
released the set up the same way, but we do that branching in public.
Fedora 40, we basically branched off. There's a little bit more detail to it than this,
but this is the high level overview. Branched off Sinto's 10 in the public and did the initial bootstrap
phase before we launched it and did the release announcement for Sinto's stream 10. Later on,
Rell minor versions branched from there, and the actual minor versions become the certified product,
and in that way Sinto's function is as the Rell major version branch.
Because of the way it's set up now, we like to say, and if you went to the Connect Conference,
you saw it on the land yard that Sinto's defines enterprise Linux.
While doing all of that, we still must, Sinto's still must follow the Rell compatibility rules.
If you look online, you can find this page, just call the application compatibility guide,
these are literally those rules. And I'll cover what I'm talking about in more detail,
and I have time to go through all of it. But the main thing is is that changes in Sinto's
aren't just independent, and we just do in the minivacum, they affect Rell in the in the very near future.
Changes aren't going to be made there that aren't decided to be appropriate for Rell customers in
the very near future. And when you put it in that context, you wouldn't say that Rell 10.1
is a completely different distro from 10.0. And likewise, Sinto's 10 isn't completely different from Rell 10.
It functions like the major version branch, and so it's very similar.
When you look at that branching model and the compatibility rules, I think it's easy to call this myth
busted as well. Sinto's is built different now, but the resulting distro, it's not that different from Rell.
And I have to bet this a minute ago, Sinto's a role in Rell 10 will be our next myth.
The origin of this one is a little bit our own fault in the project, but let's talk about it.
In the past Sinto's had major, major and minor versions, but now it's only a major version.
The stream variant was originally announced as a rolling release. The idea people had was that they
wanted to convey that it no longer had minor versions, and that it rolled from one minor version to the next.
But that's not what Rell in Rell really means. That's just not having minor versions.
If you think about what an actual Rell in Rell says with other distributions, that means there's no
version at all, there's no end of life dates, you don't have to reinstall it, and there's a single channel of
updates. Sinto's has major versions, each of those has its own update channel, and end of life date to go with it.
So I think this was a terminology mistake, and to be fair, it was corrected pretty quickly.
We realized it was causing confusion, took it down off the website, it was still in the release
announcement, because you're not really going to go back and retroactively edit that.
The term that we use now is continuously delivered. I'll be honest, I don't like this term either.
It's kind of convoluted, and people don't really understand what it means.
I'll just translate it as it gets updates, which is true for pretty much every Linux distribution.
So regardless of those details, I think we have enough data to call this one,
busted. Sinto's is not a role in Rellies.
Our next myth, Sinto's is bleeding edge. This is an extension of that role in Relliesmith, because Rell
in Relliesmith is typically do have the latest versions of software, as soon as they come out
upstream from the upstream projects, because they don't have to wait for a new version to do an
incompatible change. So let's look at Sinto's software. This one's actually really easy to
disprove, just with the data. Sinto's 9, if you look at some of the major distro components that
you would see, Colonel 514 from 2021, System D from 2022, G-Lib C from 2021.
This is 4 to 6 year old software, and that's still a current version of the Sinto's project.
Would you call 4 to 6 year old software bleeding edge? I wouldn't. And it's a similar story with
Sinto's 10, although a little bit shifted in the future, most of that software came from 2024, time frame.
And if you think back to our branching diagram, it makes perfect sense, because that's about
when they branched from Fedora. Every once in a while, you'll see a version rebasing that initial bootstrap
phase, and sometimes after it too, but a lot less common. One example I know that's upcoming
that people might be looking forward to is Sinto's 10 initially released with 947. It's been
rebased, most of the components to 949, and that's expected to show up in the next real minor
version that's happening soon this year. So based on that, we'll call this one busted also.
Just looking at the package versions, it's definitely not bleeding edge software.
Then our next myth, Sinto's still an LTS. I'll admit this one's a little bit
contrived, I didn't want all of the myths to just be busted conclusions, so I kind of inverted this one
just to have a confirmed one, but I'm spoiling it for you. Sometimes I'll see the opposite version of this
in the wild where people say it's not an LTS anymore, or I'll say it's an LTS, and people try to
correct me, but let's look at the history of the term LTS to set the context.
Canonical and Ubuntu pioneered this term in 2006 when they released Ubuntu 606 LTS Dapper Drake,
and that was a 5-year life cycle. Since then, five plus years is kind of considered an LTS,
and less than that is a short term release, or just a regular release. It's been emulated by
other distros since then. Sinto's did use to match Rails 10-year life cycle, and with the
stream changes, it did get reduced down to about five and a half years, but to me, if the term
means five plus years, that's still an LTS, even if it's less than it used to be. So that one also
makes it pretty easy just on the data to say confirmed that Sinto says still an LTS.
Myth, you can't use Sinto's in production. This one's really fun, I'm going to go a little bit quicker,
but this originated with a statement on the Red Hat website that said that it's a lot of words,
but basically it says that Red Hat doesn't recommend Sinto's streaming production.
The funny thing about that is that REL comes with promises, agreements, certifications,
and services. The only thing Red Hat recommends for production is REL with support,
and that with support part is interesting because if you go to the REL web store,
you can actually go buy REL without support, and it also says it's not intended for production
environments. So when you think about it in that context, Red Hat never endorsed the old
variant Sinto's Linux, it doesn't endorse Sinto's stream, it doesn't endorse any other
distro, and it doesn't even endorse REL without production, or without support, I mean.
So other companies, besides just what recommendations are, let's look at actual companies using it.
Unfortunately, I want to have one example of a company that's agreed to let us say their name.
That's our friends in Mehta, they're very active in Sinto's special interest groups,
and they let us know that yes, they run Sinto's stream on literally millions of servers in production,
and it works really well for them. I have talked to other companies, engineers,
and various industry, some of them are listed up there, where they've told me like, yeah, we stuck
with it, and we like these changes, and we've even contributed, but please don't mention our name
in any slide decks. I'm like, thank you. Trying to get more examples.
But based on that, we can go ahead and say this one's busted as well. You definitely can use Sinto's
in production, there's nothing that stops you, regardless of what Red Hat would like you to buy.
Sinto's is untested, we'll be our next myth, and this one bugs me because it's discounting
other people's work, which is pretty rude. Sinto's is tested at multiple levels, there's
tests that happen when you open a poor request, there's also tests within the RPM spec file itself,
if you're familiar with that, the checks section where it'll do tests from like the
upstream unit test typically. And before our package is allowed in the Sinto's stream composed,
like the collection of artifacts, it has to pass additional rail gating tests, and then once it
isn't a compose, that compose has distribution level tests that it also has to pass before it's
published out to the mirrors. So there's multiple levels and steps before updates can actually go out.
Test aren't perfect, there's always some scenario people haven't thought of,
including in rail, whenever something gets through a problem gets through that isn't covered by
the test, that's the case to open it, start a new test case to catch that in the future.
And the cool thing with the contribution model is now, you can contribute some of those tests
also if it's a blind spot that Red Hat and Sinto aren't testing for.
So it's definitely tested so that myth is busted as well.
All right, last myth is pretty spicy, I'm probably out of time or have a minute left,
but this one's good. The myth is that IBM forced the Sinto's changes.
This one's just tinfoil hat territory. Unfortunately, a lot of people think it's true because of
the timing of public things. This proving it's a little harder, it's like proving a negative.
I'd rather the people claiming this actually provide some evidence, but that's not how,
you know, the internet works. But I'll take a stab at a bust in this myth anyways.
In 2014, Red Hat hired Sinto S core maintainers. Before this, Sinto wasn't really in great shape,
the last major version before that was about eight months delayed. There's some burnout going on.
Red Hat was doing some product development to, they were doing some product development,
based on that, they wanted the project to be keep going. So they wanted to sustain it,
they hired the engineers from 2016 to 2017. Do I have any Q&A time I can burn up? No Q&A time.
Well, contribution model from 2016 to 2017 was being discussed. In 2018, IBM announced
Sinto acquired, deal close in 2019, and September 2019 Sinto stream was announced.
And even without all the past knowledge, I don't think anyone thinks a company's big
IBM can make a change like this in two months. So let's call that one busted as well.
The changes weren't driven by IBM. If you have questions coming up afterwards, again, I'm very
sorry for being late. I didn't realize I couldn't get on the end on the other side of the building.
So that's all, and thanks for coming to my talk.