Red Hat has announced a 4 year Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for RHEL 7 . This is different than their previous offering (ELP) because it provides updates for critical and important security issues.
In light of this announcement, I would like to get an official EPEL statement of the following two questions.
Can we extend EPEL 7's life 4 more years?
If we can, Should we extend EPEL 7's life 4 more years?
One of the issues will be if this is limited to a small set of systems and users. We have avoided getting access to these as the build system could 'leak' these updates.
The main problem with extending EPEL-7 is if mock etc will keep working with it. In the past, the mock and similar tools quickly turned off various old code paths which were needed to allow mock pull in older rpm releases and tools.
That said, EPEL-7 is our biggest users. It is about 3.7x times larger than EPEL-8 and EPEL-9 combined and it is still growing. [I estimate we have somewhere at least 3.7 million EPEL-7 users compared to 1 million EL8/EL9]. If more EPEL-7 users volunteer to help make it work, then I can see it working.. if not..
Metadata Update from @carlwgeorge: - Issue tagged with: meeting
This was discussed in todays EPEL Steering Committee meeting (July 5, 2023) with the following resolution.
The EPEL Steering Committee does not see maintaining EPEL-7 after the end of usual updates (1) possible or desirable by its packagers.
This resolutions was passed 9 to 0
(1) 2024-06-30
Metadata Update from @tdawson: - Issue close_status updated to: Fixed - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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