On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 01:15:30PM -0500, John Snow wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 2:25 PM Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
> >
> > The 22.04 LTS release has been out for almost a year now so its time
> > to update all the remaining images to the current LTS. We can also
> > drop some hacks we need for older clang TSAN support.
>
> We still support Ubuntu 20.04 until 2024 though, don't we? Is it safe
> to not test this platform?
>
> I've long been uncertain about what our policy actually is for docker
> tests, if we want to test every platform we support or only some of
> them; and if it's only some of them, when do we choose the older and
> when do we choose the newer?
Ideally we would test both the oldest & newest versions of each
distro we support. Practically though, we're compromised by the
limited CI resources available.
Yes, understood.
Dropping older Ubuntu images is a reasonable tradeoff, since we
still have Debian images covered in CI. Debian can be thought
of as an older version of Ubuntu to some extent, giving coverage
that will mitigate the risks of dropping 20.04.
Okay, I'll take your word for that. I am not personally familiar with how much those distros diverge; I know Ubuntu is debian-based but that's the extent of my knowledge as I don't daily-drive either.
So, firstly:
because I suspect we all have our reasons and I also agree testing newer is generally of higher value than testing older.
However, would it be possible to keep the older Ubuntu test as a manual execution that we could invoke at will, only during RC testing phase? If it's not a lot of work, I could even check that in myself as a follow-up if it isn't unwanted.
I find that "oldest version of x" is quite useful to me for testing Python stuff in particular, as that ecosystem moves pretty fast. It'd be mighty convenient to me in particular to keep an old Ubuntu test around to run manually as needed.
(Heck, even if it wasn't on CI at all but was just a container I could run locally, that would still be quite useful.)
Whaddaya think?