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

[Clark Boylan]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2021, at 8:38 AM, Clark Boylan wrote:
> 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,

To followup on this we have found volunteers for Gentoo and OpenSUSE Leap 15 maintenance. This means those images are not immediately up for removal. However, if those volunteers find they aren't sustainable for one reason or another they may still be removed.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been removed and as far as we could tell nothing was using it when we removed it. Shouldn't create any problems.

CentOS 8 removal has begun with a number of changes [0] to start removing some of the infrastructure bits (like wheel mirrors and openafs packages) that supported it. I will be reaching out to OpenStack as well as they seem to be the primary users of the centos-8 label. Hopefully we'll be able to remove all of the existing centos-8 jobs cleanly, but if not then we'll wait until a reasonable amount of time and cleanup has passed (a couple of weeks?) before force merging the removal of the nodeset and label from our zuul configs.

Fedora 34 cleanup is still in progress, but should pick up again as people return from holiday.

[0] https://review.opendev.org/q/topic:%22remove-centos-8%22+status:open