May I chip in here something from the user perspective on deprecating EL7: please leave more time. Much more time.
Two reasons:
- As Katello user, the upgrade from katello 3 to 4, i.e. migration to pulp3 was very painful. It took me a couple of months and several workaround, removing products, etc. to get my foreman/katello servers to katello 4 and there are still lots of issues open until it will be as good as it was with 3.18/pulp2. My Foreman servers and proxies all run on CentOS 7 at the moment. Several times, I have considered reinstalling from scratch but didn’t because of the amount of configuration involved to get everything as it was.
So what am saying: after months of painful migration attempts I would find it quite discerning if you tell me know, that in 9-12 months from now you have to move to EL8 (whatever way this may be and however well this migration may work).
Give users some time to get their systems to katello 4, mostly bug-free, and let them run the system smoothly without major administration for at least a year (so well into 2023). It’s just exhausting when it feels like you spend more time on getting something to run, keep it running, keep it updated, than to actually really use it and explore all the usage options you have.
- We actually haven’t really decided what comes after CentOS Linux 8. We are still evaluating and monitoring what’s out there and trying to figure out what’s the future for us. Alma, Rocky, CentOS Stream, Oracle Linux, even considering getting RHEL 8 licenses for some hosts until we are sure we have a new stable free platform we are confident about. It’s just my impression but I think this consolidation will go well into 2022 and I am worried I might have to pick an EL8 distro for my new foreman/katello because of the deprecation and may just regret it in the long run, because eventually we have focused on another distro.
So again, don’t tell people now they have to move to EL8 in these times of uncertainty. Give them at least 2022 to figure out which EL8 distro it’s going to be for them before deprecating EL7 support.
On a sidenote (or a third reason if you want): I generally really prefer products/software which in regard to distro support follow the EOL of the distro. I always now the distros and version and their EOL on my hosts. And for many of our servers we use the RHEL derivates to be able to keep them running for many years until EOL. We do this in particular so that we don’t necessarily have to go through every major version. We had quite a lot of hosts running CentOS 6 which we then replaced with CentOS 8 (before they have announced it’s EOL, too).
So my general expectation is that a product officially supports RHEL7/CentOS 7/EL7 would do so until EOL of EL7. That’s why we chose EL to begin with, because it’s supported for many years. If a product before that announces it’s deprecation of a still supported operating system, it’s quite disappointing and I would expect that quite a few people out there would rather keep their Foreman/Katello system running on EL7 with the latest support version then forcing a migration before time (if there are not too many bugs which make it hard to use Foreman/Katello properly).
And a final sidenote: there must be a well working migration process to move the existing server to a new installation on EL8. After the painful pulp migration I really don’t want to spend months again on a EL8 migration. Because otherwise, I’d start thinking if I had known that in the beginning before katello 4, it would have been much better to installation the whole thing from scratch instead of trying to migration first pulp and then to el8…