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

Andre McCurdy armccurdy at gmail.com
Thu Dec 12 04:48:04 UTC 2019


On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 7:38 PM Adrian Bunk <bunk at stusta.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 06:31:30PM -0800, Andre McCurdy wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:13 PM Denys Dmytriyenko <denis at denix.org> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 01:30:30PM -0500, Philip Balister wrote:
> > > >
> > > > 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.
> >
> > We already spend scarce engineering resources on stuff like (just as
> > an example) gcc for the target, which is a far more "niche" use case
> > than CentOS 7 support.
>
> It does matter a lot how the resulting work is distributed.
>
> There is no need to question whether niche features like gcc or GNOME
> for the target is a useful way of spending resources since the work is
> done by the people interested in the feature.

Yes, that's probably expected. Developers work on stuff which
interests them. That's precisely why there's a danger that effort and
resources don't always get spent on the work which would benefit the
widest range of users.

> Niche features like CentOS 7 support or musl place a burden on everyone
> contributing to OE, since these are common cases where completely
> unrelated contributions require extra work.

True. Continually updating all packages in oe-core and supporting
multiple CPU architecture places a burden on everyone contributing to
OE too. There's always a trade off between burdening developers and
making the project interesting / useful / usable for users.

> In some cases this even creates new bugs for everyone else,
> like the breakage caused by an incorrect CentOS 7 workaround in nettle
> that needed a last-minute fixup before the release of Yocto 2.7.

That was an embarrassing mistake, which you've brought up before. It
happens sometimes. Dropping support for CentOS 7 or musl isn't going
to stop embarrassing mistakes happening again. The good news though is
that if mistakes are fixed relatively quickly most users are either
completely unaware that anything happened or they just update and move
on. ie I don't think mistakes like that cause any real damage at all.

> > You could also ask the question why do we have scarce engineering
> > resources? One factor is that OE is not user friendly and putting up
> > more barriers (ie stricter requirements on the host OS) isn't going to
> > help with that. Effort spent to increase the chances that OE "just
> > works" by automatically providing more of its dependencies and relying
> > less on the host may be a good investment in terms of alienating less
> > users, who may then persevere long enough to eventually become
> > contributors.
>
> The problem is not lack of users, the problem is converting existing
> users into upstream contributors.
>
> Effort spent on getting more users is wasted effort if the goal is to
> improve the scarce engineering resources.

If the goal is to increase the amount of engineering resource then
attracting / retaining users and converting them to contributors are
both important.

> And existing contributors might stop contributing when a large part of
> the contributing effort ends up having to be spent on niche features
> without interest to the contributor.

That's true. It also works the other way around though - I've largely
given up contributing because the particular niche features which
interest me don't fit well upstream. Kicking niche features out of the
project can reduce contributions too.


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