On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 6:09 PM Clark Boylan <cboylan@sapwetik.org> wrote:
On Thu, May 4, 2023, at 12:34 AM, Slawek Kaplonski wrote:
Hi,
Dnia środa, 3 maja 2023 19:05:16 CEST Sean Mooney pisze:
On Wed, 2023-05-03 at 08:12 -0700, Clark Boylan wrote:
Hello everyone,
Over the last couple of years we've grown support for a number of RHEL like or RHEL adjacent distros in our CI system. We have added OpenEuler, Rocky Linux, and CentOS Stream (it replaced CentOS 8). At the same time we've fallen behind producing and updating images for Fedora.
Currently we have disk images and test nodes for Fedora 35 and 36. We mirror packages for Fedora 36 and 37. In the past our intention was always to primarily have a single up to date Fedora image and mirror setup for our CI system which would be Fedora 38 as of April 18, 2023. One option we have is to drop Fedora 35 and 37 from Nodepool and our mirrors, add Fedora 38, and then drop Fedora 36. This would basically maintain the status quo of the last few years.
That said I think this is probably a good opportunity to rethink our approach, and we are looking for your feedback. Currently the RHEL like distros are overlapping with each other a bit and for this reason we added Rocky Linux without adding extra mirroring for it. So far this seems to be stable enough as we don't run significant numbers of jobs on Rocky Linux. I think one option available to us would be to drop Fedora mirroring entirely, then add Fedora 38 images/nodes, and then drop Fedora 36 images/nodes. One upside to this approach is it will free up disk space on our OpenAFS fileservers which are under a space crunch currently.
I also wonder if we can drop Fedora entirely. It seems like CentOS Stream now occupies a similar role within our CI system. It gives us forward looking updates that will eventually be in RHEL
this is my personal opipion but i think we shoudl move to rocky for RHEL like disto testing and avoid Centos Stream or fedora for that usecase.
We have discused having voting Centos stream and fedor jobs in the past and decided that we did nto want to add etiehr to the nova ci in the futur due to the instablity we have seen in the past with centos stream based ci and the time it took for issues to get adressed.
. This allows us to test against a future state in preparation for RHEL changes. The upside to this is that Fedora's support lifetime is about 13 months but CentOS Stream releases appear to have several years of support. This should reduce the amount of mirror and image work we need to perform.
Are there specific use cases that Fedora serves that CentOS Stream does not within our CI system? If so are they important enough to continue to try and run on the Fedora release treadmill? If we do want to try and keep up with Fedora do we have any concerns dropping our local mirroring of Fedora packages? the only usecase i have had in the past for fedora is testing very very very new libvirt/qemu via the virt-preview repo. you can enable the fedora virt preview repo on CentOS Stream too and the libvirt it ships is almost as up to date as fedora even without it. so i dont think we woudl loose much if we were to remvoe fedora in that respect if its becoming a mantance burden.
so i would propsoe using Rocky for RHEL like testing and stream for rhel.next type testing.
+1 for that
Thank you for the feedback. We'll hold off on making any changes for another week, but then starting May 16th we'll begin taking steps based on the feedback we have received. If you have anything to share on this topic please do so soon.
Is there a reason we can't use RHEL itself? RHEL for CI seems to be a thing they allow at no cost[1]. In terms of mirroring RHEL packages, I know of at least one maintained method[2] for doing it easily enough (disclaimer, I helped write it long ago...). Given that it's a thing nowadays, I would much rather see us use RHEL + CentOS Stream as a combo. [1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux-op... [2]: https://github.com/datto/rhel-reposync-playbook -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!