On 2020-12-15 14:40:01 +0000 (+0000), Braden, Albert wrote: [...]
If the OpenStack community decides to continue building on Stream, we should make it crystal clear to operators and users that Stream is not a production-ready OS and that our Stream OpenStack implementation is suitable for testing and development use only, unless they devote substantial resources to mirroring and testing Stream to insulate production clusters from the instability that it will introduce.
Up until https://review.openstack.org/638045 merged last year, we used to put it plainly in our testing specs that: "The following free operating systems are representative of platforms regularly used to deploy OpenStack on: [...] Latest CentOS Major [...] The CentOS distribution is derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In reality, RHEL is more popular than CentOS but we can't use this platform on upstream gates, so we rely on CentOS." In essence, we've always been targeting RHEL and using CentOS as a stand-in substitute. For that purpose, CentOS 8 Stream ought to suffice for continued testing of our future releases to make sure they remain compatible with RHEL 8. In fact, it may actually be superior for that purpose, as it allows us to test what's going to appear in impending minor and point releases of RHEL 8 rather than testing a laggy copy of what's already been added in RHEL.
Should we replace our Centos builds with RHEL, or with Rocky?
RHEL is still not a possibility for our CI from a licensing perspective, from what I understand. Rocky Linux might be a possibility, sure, once it's more than just a readme file and vapor.
Does the community have (or can we find) the resources to do the work of maintaining stable Stream mirrors and only building OpenStack on our stable versions of Stream?
We already do: <URL: https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/commit/d2d06e690b2b8288d0b3e79... >
Or would it be better to drop Centos support and focus our efforts on operating systems that have not implemented unilateral changes that harm the community? [...]
The TripleO project is by far the largest user of our CI infrastructure (in aggregate node-hours), and they only work on RHEL/RDO or close derivatives like CentOS, so I expect at least they'll see value in continuing to have something RHEL-like to test changes against. -- Jeremy Stanley