Samba testing on CentOS 8

Alexander Bokovoy ab at samba.org
Thu Dec 10 08:01:48 UTC 2020


On to, 10 joulu 2020, Martin Schwenke via samba-technical wrote:
> Hi Rowland,
> 
> On Wed, 9 Dec 2020 15:42:27 +0000, Rowland penny via samba-technical
> <samba-technical at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi, based on what is all over the internet about the future of Centos, 
> > should we continue to test anything on Centos 8 ? I mean, we may get to 
> > a point where we do not know whether a fault is down to Samba code or 
> > code that isn't in RHEL but is in Centos stream. Just a thought and I 
> > could be talking out of my hat.
> 
> You make sense and I agree.  When CentOS becomes a rolling testing
> stream then it will no longer be a stable platform for testing.  Amitay
> and I were discussing this yesterday and we didn't come up with a good
> answer. One reason why there is no good answer is that we want a stable
> testing environment but sometimes Samba moves faster than the stable
> distros (e.g. CentOS 7 and GNU TLS) and this might happen again,
> possibly with other distros (e.g. Debian stable).

I don't think there is a need to overreact now. As FAQ on
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates  points in Q10,
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10:

---------
In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost
programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source
projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use
cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better
serve the needs of systems administrators and partner developers. We’ll
share more details on these initiatives as they become available. For
those converting to RHEL, there is guidance available today for
converting from CentOS Linux to RHEL.
---------

I hope an improvement on the RHEL Developer subscription would allow to
run RHEL in Samba CI runs, so this would be just a retargeting.

Right now, CentOS 8 is there for about at least a year and by the time
CentOS 8 Stream is fully implemented, it is not going to be a testing
bed that changes every single day. Remember, it is the next RHEL 8.x
target, so it is not like Debian Sid or Rawhide or even Fedora branched.
There is quite less of a move there.

As I wrote on freeipa-users@ yesterday,

---------------------------
With most of RHEL development moving into a public space in C8S and
Fedora ELN, the feedback loop should get shorter. Many of the changes
were already discussed during last two years at Flock and other
conferences, ongoing work in the infrastructure and processes to support
this certainly make life of RHEL packagers 'interesting' but the end
result is an increase of a attention to details and a lot more stability
to the 'pre-release' composes.

I can only talk about FreeIPA and few other projects I am involved with.
For example, we are getting incredible feedback from both Rawhide and
RHEL 8.x QA processes for FreeIPA 4.9.0 release candidates. The packages
are not yet in RHEL 8.x development composes as we do fixes to issues
found through the QA pre-verification work. Once overall state of the
release candidate is at the level RHEL IdM QA team accepts, those
packages will get to RHEL composes and eventually land in C8S (once the
infra is ready). Once C8S is there in full capacity and running upstream
CI tests on it would become a reality, we'll see even more shortening of
that feedback loop length.
--------------------------

The same, I think, stands for Samba, though Samba will most likely get
more win from the additional availability of stable RHEL releases for CI
use.


> However, right now I have limited time available to make changes to our
> testing environment.  So my pre-Xmas goal is to open a bug, "fix" the
> CentOS 8 bootstrap script, backport the fix to 4.12/4.13 and have a
> working test environment again.
> 
> Hopefully in the new year I'll find time to update autocluster to use
> something else as a test environment.  Part of this is probably to add
> support for the Debian family of distros.  At least then we will have
> flexibility if things change.
 


-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy



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