[CentOS] CentOS 7/8s EOL : infrastructure impacts (please read)

Mon Mar 18 07:28:39 UTC 2024
Fabian Arrotin <arrfab at centos.org>

Hi all,

As you're all aware (we sent multiple mails in the last year about 
this), CentOS 7 and Stream 8 will go EOL soon : 
https://blog.centos.org/2023/04/end-dates-are-coming-for-centos-stream-8-and-centos-linux-7/

Let's lists some things that will happen on the CentOS Infrastructure as 
we'll be approching (or passed) these dates :

# CentOS 7/8s content itself
Usual process : content will be archived to https://vault.centos.org and 
removed from mirror.centos.org completely, with just a simple readme 
file dropped here (for example http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/readme 
for already EOL'ed version). Worth knowing that some SIGs are still 
building for RHEL8, still supported for SIGs through 
https://cbs.centos.org so such kind of content will continue to be 
available there as long as SIGs can build against/for it

# CBS/koji (https://cbs.centos.org)
No impact on CBS env itself ( not running centos 7 nor 8s for a long 
time now) but the various build tag reflecting centos 7 and 8s will be 
locked so that nobody would be able to build content anymore : that 
would even be impossible as content itself will have been removed from 
mirror.centos.org (internally used for cbs build tags)

# CentOS Forums (https://forums.centos.org) :
still running on centos 7 and even if that's easy to migrate to 
newer/supported EL version, it was decided to just shutdown the service 
(based on discussion with the actual moderation team). An option (to be 
announced on forums.centos.org ?) is to eventually start moving 
thread/discussions on Fedora discourse (There is already a CentOS 
category there : https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/neighbors/centos/71)
So the plan is just to shutdown forums.centos.org and remove A/AAAA 
records from DNS

# mirrorlist.centos.org service :
Starting from Stream 9 (and above), deployed CentOS instance ares using 
Fedora infra mirrormanager instance for metalink= instead of mirrorlist= 
in .repo files. We'll just decommission our mirror crawler (also running 
with a mix of perl/python2 code), so not validating any mirror for 
legacy/EOL releases. mirrorlist.centos.org A/AAAA records will be 
removed in the following weeks after c7 will be EOL'ed.
That means that people still running CentOS 7 or 8-stream will not have 
functional yum/dnf stack, except if they point to either vault or have 
internal mirror but at least people would be aware that distro itself is 
EOL and that they shouldn't expect to receive any update anymore

# CentOS mailing-lists
Currently running on mailman2 stack, on top of CentOS 7 linux : there is 
WIP to port everything to up2date mailman3 stack, actually packaged for 
EPEL9.
We have successfully imported archives into mailman3 and same for lists 
config but let's start a different/separate thread to discuss changes 
(like renaming lists, see next coming thread)

Kind Regards,

-- 
Fabian Arrotin
The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org
gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | @arrfab[@fosstodon.org]
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