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

[Adrian Bunk]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 08:48:04PM -0800, Andre McCurdy wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 7:38 PM Adrian Bunk <bunk at stusta.de> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

This is not a danger, this is how open source projects work.

Yocto is not a company where all developers are paid resources that can 
be told what to spend their time on.

Developers spend effort on what is useful for their local paid work,
or what is fun to do as a hobby.

>...
> > 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.

Not exactly embarrassing, the problem is obvious only in hindsight.

> It happens sometimes. Dropping support for CentOS 7 or musl isn't going
> to stop embarrassing mistakes happening again.
>...

It avoids bugs being introduced by workarounds.

Trying to build and run 2020 software on a 2013 distribution is 
problematic, and will generate more and more problems noone else
has seen or is interested in fixing.

Bumping the baseline by 3 years to Ubuntu 16.04 would make both existing 
and future OE-specific workarounds for ancient hosts unnecessary.

cu
Adrian