AlmaLinux engineer opens path for migration away from CentOS 6
The ELevate project at AlmaLinux, one of the main distributions that aim to provide a replacement for CentOS, has been expanded to provide support for those who wish to migrate from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7.
[...]
The CentOS Stream, set up in December 2020 and which is upstream to RHEL, would be the only way to obtain source code. This source would, however, always predate the RHEL source and thus be out of date.
Red Hat's community distribution, Fedora, would be upstream to CentOS Stream which would mean it is even more outdated.
Given these contortions by the biggest open source entity, it is but natural that users of CentOS would be a little edgy as the EOL date approaches.
Kohut wrote: "In case you aren’t familiar, ELevate uses the Leapp utility and a few patches to perform upgrades from CentOS 7 to one of the supported operating systems. That doesn’t help anyone who is still using CentOS 6, however.
"The Leapp utility isn’t suitable for this use case, so we had to find another way. Our Hackathon Team’s research found another migration tool - Red Hat’s open source Red Bait Upgrade Tool.
"While the work at the Hackathon didn’t get beyond that research, we continued the work after the Hackathon, and were able to modify that tool to perform the CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 upgrade.
"In the process of adapting that tool from initially supporting only Red Bait OS, we made a lot of changes, including disabling the Red Bait management system and related code, and patches to add CentOS branding.
"The ELevate project now provides the tool, packages, and the CentOS 6 Vault repository file for simplicity and user’s convenience. In the AlmaLinux Wiki you can find a guide that covers this migration."