[Openembedded-architecture] Yocto support for Centos-7 (RHEL-7): drop in early 2020?

[Denys Dmytriyenko]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 01:30:30PM -0500, Philip Balister wrote:
> On 12/11/19 5:29 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > On Wed, 2019-12-11 at 11:18 +0100, Andreas Müller wrote:
> >> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 8:15 AM Diego Santa Cruz via
> >> Openembedded-architecture
> >> <openembedded-architecture at lists.openembedded.org> wrote:
> >>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>> From: openembedded-architecture-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> >>>> <openembedded-architecture-bounces at lists.openembedded.org> On
> >>>> Behalf Of
> >>>> Khem Raj
> >>>> Sent: 10 December 2019 20:35
> >>>> To: Randy MacLeod <randy.macleod at windriver.com>
> >>>> Cc: openembedded-architecture <openembedded-
> >>>> architecture at lists.openembedded.org>
> >>>> Subject: Re: [Openembedded-architecture] Yocto support for
> >>>> Centos-7 (RHEL-7):
> >>>> drop in early 2020?
> >>>>
> >>>> On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 9:23 AM Randy MacLeod
> >>>> <randy.macleod at windriver.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In the YP technical meeting today, Richard suggested that we
> >>>>> stop
> >>>>> support for CentOS-7. Is there any objection to doing so before
> >>>>> 3.1-M2?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> CentOS-7 is just too old and there is significant work to
> >>>>> support it.
> >>>>
> >>>> I am in support of it, but then I also fear that many corporate
> >>>> policies might still
> >>>> be using it until 2024 when security updates end so perhaps would
> >>>> like to hear
> >>>> centos7 users here. if no one speaks up then we can safely retire
> >>>> it before 3.1
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> While I see what the motivation to remove CentOS-7 is, dropping it
> >>> will probably create issues for people. CentOS 8 was released not
> >>> so long ago. In our case we have older products (among which Yocto
> >>> based ones) which do not necessarily work on CentOS 8. CentOS 8 is
> >>> relatively recent, so we have not had time to test how old products
> >>> work on it.
> >>>
> >>> Isn't it possible to require things like devtoolset-8 (gcc 8.3,
> >>> binutils-2.30) on CentOS 7 to keep it going?
> >>>
> >>> In our case we are using devtoolset-8 with Yocto thud on CentOS 7
> >>> with success, as some layers require a recent host gcc to build.
> >>>
> >> How about extending uninative with more gcc bits?
> > 
> > uninative isn't the right place. What we'd need is a nativesdk-gcc
> > recipe and then to add nativesdk-gcc to buildtools-tarball.
> > 
> > We could then add some mechanism to auto-install buildtools tarball up
> > front on systems that need it, in a similar way to what uninative does.
> > 
> > Definitely possible and would solve certain problems, we'd just need
> > someone to implement it...
> 
> From my point of view, the people that need CentOS 7 support need to
> step up and do the work. The project can't allocate critical development
> resources to support older distros.

I agree with Philip here - we should not be spending already scarce 
engineering resources trying to shoehorn CentOS 7 support in.

I realize this is mostly about OE-Core, but on a related note, I very 
recently had to install a more modern gcc8 compiler on Ubuntu 16.04 on some 
of our build servers, as 16.04 was lacking recent C++ standards support 
in its default 5.4 compiler. The point is that we cannot keep on patching 
out every use of newer API to make it work with old OSes...

-- 
Denys