Maintaining a Linux distribution in a consistent and secure manner is challenging. Maintaining a one-to-one clone, can be even more challenging. Rocky Linux maintains a number of in-house tools to aid in this process and makes it as transparent and auditable as possible.
Rocky Linux is aiming to be an exact RHEL clone. When the project first started out, the landscape of tools to automate imports and orchestrate builds across package types were not widespread. First challenge to tackle was imports and patches. Srpmproc was introduced to facilitate upstream imports with consistent automated patching. Distrobuild was later introduced as a meta-orchestration layer for already existing build tools within the EL ecosystem. We're now introducing Peridot, the next generation cloud-native build and release tools for RPM distributions.
