I analyzed vmcore (kernel crash dumps) when I was working at a support center as a technical staff for troubleshooting RHEL/CentOS servers. When using CentOS in enterprise servers (despite RH does not provide support for CentOS, some companies/organizations might provide fault-analysis service for CentOS), all binary/src/debuginfo rpm files are expected to be available without delay and remain available even after end of life. And
On 2020/12/20 12:11, Mike McGrath wrote:
Once a new RHEL minor release is available, the "RHEL kernel" repository is moved to vault (or deleted?) and we re-start with an empty "RHEL kernel" repository. We will then add the new RHEL minor release's kernel.
I hope that "RHEL kernel" for older RHEL minor releases are not deleted when a new RHEL minor release becomes available.
I don't think we have a particular retention policy for stream though even if we did, a simple local mirror would solve your problem, right?
since the support center I was working at and administrators who install RHEL or CentOS or Ubuntu are different companies/organizations, maintaining local mirror servers does not solve my problem.
What is sometimes troublesome and risky is that we need debuginfo rpm files. I worry that availability of src rpm and debuginfo rpm is rather unreliable. If debuginfo rpm files were unavailable, it becomes impossible to contribute like https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/9/19/230 .
RH has infrastructure for serving all these files, but CentOS's infrastructure looks poor. For example, although http://debuginfo.centos.org/8/x86_64/Packages/ contains kernel-debuginfo-4.18.0-*.rpm , http://debuginfo.centos.org/8-stream/ is currently empty.
If binary/src/debuginfo rpm files for CentOS Stream will be removed like Fedora, the support center I was working at would have to give up providing fault-analysis service for CentOS Stream. If RH is expecting CentOS Stream users to contribute with testing/debugging, I think that improving such distribution infrastructure is important.
If CentOS Linux is moved to CentOS Stream, will this availability problem be solved?