Samba testing on CentOS 8

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2020-12-10 at 14:27 +1100, 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).
> 
> 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.

One advantage of the current bootstrap system is that as long as nobody
deletes the CI images that are built, the existing images remain a
stable snapshot.  It is 'just' the bootstrap scripts that break for
others, and of course building a new image now becomes more difficult.
 
It is particularly sad that the end-user use of the bootstrap script
could become less reproducible, that was a really nice feature.

I'm assuming that, in the space of a few years another CentOS
replacement will grow up into this same space, rebuilding the SRPMS of
a specific RHEL release, but in the meantime this is going to be
awkward...

Of course I must say I greatly appreciate the efforts put in by Red Hat
and Red Hat's staff to building this ecosystem to which we have enjoyed
for so long.  

Thanks,

Andrew Bartlett


-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)        https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001)  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT    https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba