Open Stack

Hello fellow openstackers!

At the moment it's not possible to migrate the ironic-python-agent-builder
src jobs from bionic to focal nodeset because of diskimage-builder
limitations.
We're stuck with ubuntu bionic and we're pinning those jobs to the bionic
nodeset for the time being:
https://review.opendev.org/756291

One of the community goals for victoria is to move the base nodeset of the
CI jobs from ubuntu bionic to focal.
In general, doing this for most of the ironic projects has not been
trivial, but still doable, and it has been accomplished almost entirely.
The biggest challenge comes from the src jobs in
ironic-python-agent-builder where, for some of them, we build
ironic-python-agent ramdisks using rpm-based distributions (mainly centos)
with diskimage-builder on ubuntu bionic.
This is possible using utilities (e.g. yumdownloader) included in packages
still present in the ubuntu repositories, such as yum-utils and rpm.
Starting from Ubuntu focal, the yum-utils package has been removed from the
repositories because of lack of support of Python 2.x and there's no plan
to provide such support, at least to my knowledge.
The alternative provided by dnf is not usable as there's also no plan to
compile and provide a package of dnf for deb-based distributions.
For the reasons mentioned above, currently the ironic project team can't
complete the migration of the CI jobs from bionic to focal and there's no ETA
on when this can be accomplished.

Considering all the things in the preamble, two possibilities are available:
- change the mechanics in diskimage-builder; this process would completely
change the way DIB builds rpm-based distros; this approach delegates the
work almost entirely to the DIB team.
- instead of migrating to focal, migrate to centos-8 nodeset; that would
mean having devstack+ironic working on centos-8, which poses an interesting
challenge and would consume no little resources from the ironic team.

Opinions and advice are very welcome!

Thanks,

Riccardo
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