With CentOS 7.6 being released on 3 Dec 2018, would expect the immediate priority is to get ClearOS 7.6 out of the door...
CentOS has released CentOS Linux 7.6 (1810)

Not sure that the developers would consider the changes required for ClearOS to go from 7.x -> 8.x "trivial"

Tony
Website

Hello Mick,
The RHEL packages are nowhere as old as they seem. RHEL have a policy aiming for stability, and they back-port patches into their current packages. You will find PHP and Apache are fully patched against all current critical vulnerabilities despite having an old version number. Have a look at

rpm -q --changelog httpd

rpm -q --changelog php

It is a similar story with the kernel. A lot of the more recent fixes and drivers have been back-ported into the current kernel. I read somewhere that the EL7 kernel is now much closer to 4.10 (I think) rather than the original 3.10.

Tony has posted as I am typing, but the push at the moment of for 7.6. Personally I'd like to see it released into the community a.s.a.p and into the paid editions in the New Year.

The change to v8 is going to be much more significant. For a start, RHEL have pulled OpenLDAP as their directory server. Clearcenter would like to try and take ClearOS closer to RHEL/Centos which means using the new RHEl directory server (389 Directory Server). I also believe they want to head towards a more docker containerised architecture if they have the resources. Following the warning shot from Micro$oft over the summer when (probably due to a bug) Win 10 could no longer join an old-style NT4 domain, they like to develop a docker/samba solution for Active Directory support, replacing the withdrawn Samba Directory (Beta) app. I am not sure what else in on the cards.

Nick Howitt wrote:

...Following the warning shot from Micro$oft over the summer when (probably due to a bug) Win 10 could no longer join an old-style NT4 domain...

Hi Nick

Just as a Side note here:
That was totally Microsofts Fault as they decided to drop default support to the smb 1.0 protocol. This was easy to get around though but took a bit of hands on work to do - ie add it back through "add windows features". We had that problem at work where all of a sudden all newly staged Laptops (a couple of thousand to be exact) landed outside the domain.

Shaun Ellensohn wrote:

Nick Howitt wrote:

...Following the warning shot from Micro$oft over the summer when (probably due to a bug) Win 10 could no longer join an old-style NT4 domain...

Hi Nick

Just as a Side note here:
That was totally Microsofts Fault as they decided to drop default support to the smb 1.0 protocol. This was easy to get around though but took a bit of hands on work to do - ie add it back through "add windows features". We had that problem at work where all of a sudden all newly staged Laptops (a couple of thousand to be exact) landed outside the domain.

Enabling SMB 1.0 still did not allow new installations to join an NT4 style domain. Only installing a Win10 1809 fix from September finally sorted it.

FWIW, with ClearOS7.x, since samba updated to 4.7.1, you don't need SMB1.0 and more and can disable the the setting the Webconfig.

Tony Ellis wrote:
Not sure that the developers would consider the changes required for ClearOS to go from 7.x -> 8.x "trivial"
Website

Maybe not trivial - but backporting and catering to ancient versions of things in RH/CentOS 7x vs getting some newer versions of "stuff" fedora 19 -> fedora 28 is a long time and trying to get "stuff" working in fedora 19 era at then end of 2018 (5+ years of time travel) cant be easy or getting any easier. Almost the entire 3.x linux branches are EOL except 3.16.x.

Nick Howitt wrote:
..

Thanks for the information. I do know people who work with Red Hat folks on the kernel and nobody likes that back-porting work. Im not saying its not patched, im saying keeping that cruft patched is a terrible job that nobody likes doing. It will be a great relief getting back to where the current versions of things are. RH should not be going 5 years between major releases, bad form.
I get the 7.6 coming first - but curious when any alpha / very dirty test releases of 8 are planned.

Cool there is a RHEL 8 beta!

I'm very interested what ClearOS 8 will bring. I'm particularly interested in Docker. Peter and Dave are hard at work to integrate Docker into ClearOS 8. The latest info I have is from October. I know there were sounds to separate ClearOS server and ClearOS gateway because of Docker incompatibility. I'm not sure if this is still the case.