Drop support for running Foreman on Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04

Development RFCs
1

RFC: Drop support for running Foreman on Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04

Context and Problem Statement

Dropping older versions helps reduce the maintenance burden. Especially dropping Ubuntu 22.04 helps with Upgrading Foreman to a supported Rails version. Debian 12 standard security support also ended 2 months ago (Debian | endoflife.date).

This is very similar to Deprecation plans for Foreman on EL7, Debian 10 and Ubuntu 18.04, but this time I wasn’t really on time with a proper deprecation plan because I wasn’t sure we could even deliver the support to run on newer versions. Thanks to @evgeni Foreman 5.0 adds support for running on Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04.

Proposal

  • Deprecate running Foreman on Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 with Foreman 5.0 by updating the release notes
  • Drop support with Foreman 5.1

Decision Outcome

What was the decision that was ultimately made and relevant outcomes with links.

Impacts

Admins will need to upgrade their OS while running Foreman 5.0. The typical flow will be:

  • Upgrade Foreman to 5.0
  • Upgrade the OS to Debian 13 / Ubuntu 24.04
  • Upgrade Foreman to 5.1
2

One thing to consider: right now foreman_google is broken on Debian 13, as its dependency grpc fails to compile with the GCC in Trixie. This means users with that plugin installed cannot upgrade to Trixie and have no clean upgrade path to 5.1 if this RFC goes through.

With that I am not saying we should not plan to drop Debian 12 in 5.1, but that we need to ensure we fix foreman_google first.