[service-announce] Changes to OpenDev's stable of CI images

[Clark Boylan]

Hello,

CentOS 8 reaches end of life on December 31, 2021. This means now is the time for you to convert jobs to CentOS 8|9 Stream or some other appropriate platform. The OpenDev team will plan to remove CentOS 8 images and mirrors from our infrastructure in early January, hopefully by January 14, 2022. Again, please update your jobs now so that you are prepared. These changes are necessary as the distro will no longer be supported, and there is no way for us to ensure that the images will be secure or that we'll even be able to build them.

We've also got Fedora 35 lined up to replace Fedora 34. Due to Fedora's short support window we typically swap out one Fedora release with the next when the next is ready. If you are using the fedora-34 label please update it to fedora-35. If you are using fedora-latest we'll be updating that to use fedora-35 and the swap will happen automatically for you. We expect to have Fedora 34 cleaned up by the end of the year.

Additionally both OpenSUSE 15 and Tumbleweed could use some help. For OpenSUSE 15 we need to update it to 15.3 as well as updating the associated mirrors if we plan to keep it around. I'm happy to keep this image around if we can get volunteers in the community that can help with that. If there isn't interest in modernizing the OpenSUSE 15 images I'd like to propose we clean them up in January along with the CentOS 8 images. For Tumbleweed, the images haven't received much use or attention. I'd like to propose that we simply retire this image and clean it up. We had thought it might be a good platform for monitoring upcoming changes in the Linux world, but the reality is that only works if you've got people active caring for it and adjusting to those changes. The Tumbleweed cleanup will likely begin before the end of the year.

Finally, our Gentoo images bounce between being buildable and broken with more time spent being broken than not. I'd like to propose that this image also get cleaned up in the near future. Again, if there is interest in the community for keeping this alive I think we can make that happen. But as is this image is not in a sustainable place and it would be better for us to stop running jobs on it.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments,

Clark