CentOS mirror installation media, which currently ships with Foreman, is set to http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$major/os/$arch. This will not work for CentOS 8 and most likely for next versions as structure of the directories changed due to modularization. Therefore we need to reflect this because the overall goal is that CentOS provisioning should work out of box, even when Katello is not used (which handles this in its own way).
So for Foreman core, I propose one of the following changes:
Add some kind of heuristic into RedHat family operating system and if the version is higher than 8, then Foreman would rewrite the URL from $major/os/$arch to $major/BaseOS/$arch/kickstart. This is more user friendly to new users, however if you ask me I would prefer cleaner approach:
Add new installation media named āCentOS 8 mirrorā with URL set to http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$major/BaseOS/$arch/kickstart. There is a risk that users will not match OS versions and installation media correctly leading to 404 errors.
As I said, I prefer (2) and we can probably rename the old one too, so we would end up with something more obvious:
CentOS mirror (7.x)
CentOS mirror (8.x)
This convention should be pretty clear for 90% of the users of 7 and 8 versions, however there might be still some doubt for those who still use 6 or 5. But I think itās fair since this should not be majority and anything like āCentOS legacy mirrorā would be probably too confusing for users of 7.x series.
What you think?
I will then go ahead and rebase my initial PR to a simple installation mirror addition (and rename) since everything else works perfectly. No ther changes in Foreman core are needed and Katello-managed repositories should also work automatically with 8.0 due to the template change (additional_repos) in the 2.1 version.
could you not make this s simple process of just creating two CentOS medias, CentOS current and CentOS Legacy - and as CentOS 7 goes EOL (not doubt around the time of a later Foreman release) just remove CentOS legacy ?
I am not sure I am following. I want to explicitly mention 8 and 7 version numbers because I can foresee newcomers struggling with what Legacy actually mean. Also thereās CentOS Value repositories which hold older releases (6 and older I think atm). That could be confusing too.
But other than that I aligh with your proposal - 7 could be renamed or removed later on.
If you mean the vault then it has a clear warning that users are not supposed to use these to provision. In Foreman we should not provide these so no need to consider this.
I agree with this. CentOS 7 will not be EOL so legacy feels odd. How about non-modular?
I like explicit naming (therefore I vote 7 / 8+). However it may be better to call it āCentOS 7 mirrorā and just āCentOS mirrorā, few years from now, CentOS 7 will be obsolete and I suppose āCentOS mirrorā will be the only mirror again for 8 and 9. FTR Iām OK with 8+ too.
For the reasons Iāve described above, I think it does. But we can always rename them later on when majority of user base will be on 8 and 9 if there is no similar change needed. Something like CentOS non-modular mirror or something like that could work.
Now, thatās a win! I propose to go with āCentOS 7.x mirrorā and āCentOS 8.x mirrorā.
Letās get that PR merged. I would like to see this in 2.0 as I see this as substantial and core feature of Foreman, however this is a migration and I am not sure if we allow migrations in z-releases. @tbrisker?
