On 3/21/19 4:33 PM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:

EPEL 6 will be supported until November 30 2020, EPEL 7 will be supported until June 30 2024. Yum will be required to create their buildroots until then.

Right.

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019, 17:30 Dennis Gregorovic dgregor@redhat.com wrote:

...

Hi,

On the Koji community call yesterday, a point was raised that mock bootstrap support[0] in Koji is needed in order to support epel 6 builds. I'd like to dive into that a bit more to better understand the problem and the options.

Sure. The problem is that koji currently uses the builder package managers (dnf, or yum until it no longer exists) to populate the mock chroot and install buildrequires. This means after yum goes away, epel chroots would use dnf instead of yum to do this. This may "work", but if it did it could well produce different results than yum did.

mock has a bootstrap feature where you can tell it, hey, install rhel7 yum and use that to populate things and install build requires, if we have support for that nothing could change for epel6/7.

...

Kevin, if I understand correctly, this would become an issue when F31 is deployed on the builders. About when would that be and when does epel 6 need to be supported until?

Correct.

as Dennis noted EPEL6 goes EOL on 2020-11-30, but epel7 longer of course.

We already have a tweak to tell koji which package_manager to use:

Tag options: mock.new_chroot : 0 mock.package_manager : 'dnf'

Perhaps we could extend that to add a 'mock.bootstrap: 1' to have it to use bootstrap support? Or, frankly bootstrap support makes sense to me for everything, so it could just be the full default.

On 3/22/19 6:54 am, Michael McLean wrote:

Alternate solution: use centos7 builders for epel builds.

In fact if we have this feature we could in theory go back to our builders being rhel instead of Fedora.

But yes, we could move our epel builders to just be rhel7/centos7, but it means we have some builders that are just almost always idle. In fact we are going to have to do this anyhow, due to ppc64. ;(

So, while I think this is a good thing and I think koji should implement it, it's not the end of the world for us if it's not in place by f31.

kevin