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 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?
Please let us know, Clark