On 17/02/2023 16.59, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 04:55:49PM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
....
> The cost/benefit tradeoff of dropping the platforms entirely
> is not obviously favourable when we don't have clear demand
> to bump the min versions of native packages, and the cost to
> users stuck on these platforms to build their own toolchain
> or libraries is very high.
There's another urgent point which I completely forget to mention in my
patch description (not sure how I managed that, since it's bugging me quite
badly in the past weeks): We're struggling heavily with CI minutes.
The only viable solution for CI minutes is going to be private runners, it's not easy to cut 30% of the jobs.
We're using less than half of our Azure sponsorship budget, and could also find other sources; either Azure Kubernetes or AWS Fargate are pretty cheap for running CI because unlike VM instances you pay for just the time that CI is running (at least with Azure you still have VMs but they scale out dynamically).
The complicated part is setting up the kubernetes executor for gitlab-runner, but we'll find someone. :)
Paolo
If we
have to support multiple major releases for a long time in parallel, there
will always be the desire to have all major releases also tested in the CI
... and honestly, we're really struggling quite badly there right now - as
you know, we've already run out of CI minutes in January in the main
project, and also in my forked repo I'm struggling each month. Additionally,
it's of course additional effort to keep everything in the "green" state the
more you have to support.
We're currently "lucky" in a sense that we're only testing one version of
CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu right now, but there have been voices in the past
weeks asking for more already (like we also did in the past already). I'd
really appreciate if we could have a clearer policy here to support less at
the same time. It would help with the pressure on the CI and the effort and
time it takes to maintain all that stuff.
Thomas