On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 at 16:52, Ken Dreyer via devel devel@lists.centos.org wrote:
Hi folks.
We use CentOS Stream for Ceph's CI along with other distributions.
When CentOS Stream 8 went EOL, we could no longer "yum install" packages for it. As a result, Ceph's build and testing infrastructure broke in important ways that were difficult to debug. Engineers spent a lot of unplanned time fixing things. For example, in Ceph we test many upgrade paths against very old versions, because we want confidence in our upgrade processes. Several of these old environments are EOL, but these tests are important to our users. When Ceph upgrades are stable, our users have confidence to get onto non-EOL releases. The security risk of using EOL bits in our test lab is acceptable because our environment is a secured network where we reimage regularly.
The Ceph project was not alone with broken CI recently. Other projects that experienced similar trouble when we could not install packages on EOL CentOS.
When I "podman pull ubuntu:trusty", I can "apt update" and still install
packages. That went EOL in 2019.
When I "podman pull" end-of-life fedoras, like fedora:31, I can "dnf install" packages too.
When CentOS Stream 9 goes EOL, would you please update MirrorManager so that package installs continue to work?
I am not sure how changing this behaviour needs to be done. Is it something that needs to be asked of the CentOS board to get better guidance. I know it came up several times before the EOL, and I thought the guidance was that CentOS Stream products meeting their EOL follow the same rules as CentOS Linux releases. 1. Content is copied to vault.centos.org 2. All mirror links are removed 3. All containers and other 'official' content is removed.
The main reason for this is that none of this content is getting any security or fix updates and too many people seem to expect that they will get those updates if the product is publicly available. For releases like CentOS 7 and before this took up a lot of time.
However, CentOS Stream is not CentOS Linux. It is mainly used for CI/CD or people with a greater understanding of the limitations of the operating systems.