CentOS or Debian? Which one? Okay, so now I have a clear and definitive answer from experience.
CentOS is most useful only in specific company environments. Many of the practices and methods for working with CentOS are highly specialized, meaning to build a machine only to be used for a specific purpose.
If you want something more general purpose, like is the case for libre software development at home, you definitely want to go with the Debian side of matters. DKMS is well supported which is needed for a variety of applications, but DKMS does not exist on the Red Hat side of affairs. Also, the official package repositories are much broader, a big boon to typical hobbyist use that is much more inclusive in features and functions on a single machine for “development.” The typical hobbyist use for specialized configurations is embedded systems. The other use, large server farms, is of course too expensive.
I saw that the MHVTL installation uses rpmbuild to build the kernel modules from source, and I was wondering why they didn’t simply use DKMS in a binary package to do likewise. So it turns out that Red Hat doesn’t want to support DKMS, that’s why.
20180329/https://access.redhat.com/discussions/2336291
So, the alternative. Since test configs do not use rolling upgrades that change the kernel version on live configs, we can pre-build the kernel packages for the specific kernel version that we are using and put those in Artifactory.