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

[Khem Raj]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 11:14 PM Diego Santa Cruz
<Diego.SantaCruz at spinetix.com> 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.
>

it will start with 3.1 which means that this impacts when user is
upgrading beyong 3.1, so there still is time to plan upgrade of build
infra if one plans to.

> Isn't it possible to require things like devtoolset-8 (gcc 8.3, binutils-2.30) on CentOS 7 to keep it going?
>

It certainly is, and perhaps a good writeup enabling scl to use
updated toolchain might be a good contribution to yocto projects "How
do I" page [1]
however, in many cases IT folks dont let users install packages as
they wish, so it still would require some process change on top of
prerequisites that
yocto already asks for.

> 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.
>
it certainly means extra work for setup etc and scl is interactive, so
perhaps if its described clearly how one can use it that might help
end users.

[1] https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/How_do_I