Plans for EL4 End of Life

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 01/04/2012 07:21 AM, Michael Stahnke wrote:
> So, we have about 60 days until EL4 goes to End of Life from Red 
> Hat[1] (and thus triggering CentOS, and I imagine Oracle, Scientific 
> et al).
>
> What are the plans for EPEL 4?
>
> The way I see we have a few options:
>
> 1.  We stop putting new content in EPEL4 and take down the EPEL mirror 
> (thus really end-of-lifeing EPEL 4)
> 2.  We stop putting in new content, and leave the mirrors, thus 
> allowing those who haven't migrated to ahve some sort of package 
> options, with no option for updates
> 3.  We keep allow people to add content to EPEL4 due to things like 
> extended support
> 4.  Some other option I haven't though about yet.
>
I am for a combination of 2 and 3. I am 100% sure that even after RHEL4 
goes end of life, many functional systems that are now running on RHEL4 
will be preserved, even if there would be no new deployments. I see no 
reason to force them to stop using EPEL [*].
OTOH I do agree with Toshi's idea to migrate the repository to 
archives.f.o and allowing the public mirrors to opt-out.

>
> I like 1 the best, because it only helps enforce lifecycle planning.  
> And when I worked in big enterprise, I needed all the help I could get 
> to be able to move systems.  :)
Help as in "look, I want you to migrate, here is an argument you can use 
to convince your management and all the people who provide software for 
you: I'll cut access to the optional packages that you might wish to use" ??


>   Plus it allows our maintainers to focus effort on 5/6 enhancements 
> and fixes.
I'd say it is up to maintainers to decide.
FWIW, I know of an idiotic ( and niche ) medical application which still 
relies on Sybase 7 and the developers blindly refuse to support it on 
anything but RHEL 4. Or Windows (where they do use Sybase 9...). And no, 
I could not persuade the users of that application to ditch the 
application and use something decent and written in this century.


[*] assuming they do use it, of course