Drop RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 support and move to Python 3.8 minimum?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2023-08-18 at 11:52 +1200, Douglas Bagnall wrote:
> On 18/08/23 11:20, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical wrote:
> > We need to reduce our CI time, and one way to do that is to
> > reuseobjects as much as possible, creating read-only objects once
> > per class,not per test.
> > This is much cleaner if with the addCleanup() and
> > addClassCleanup()methods, so I would like to be able to do that.
> > To do that we need Python 3.8.  The primary blocker for this is
> > theCentOS 7 build which uses Python 3.6 from EPEL, and a newer
> > Python isnot in that repo.
> 
> I had a look at the Python 3.8 git history for Lib/unittest to see if
> it would be simple to backport/recreate the ClassCleanup code into
> our TestCase wrappers (like we used to do for various assert
> methods), and the answer is NO. Thankfully.
> I have no opinions about Centos 7, but I do agree that the supported
> Python versions need to be exactly determined by CI.
> Douglas

I would note that times when we didn't line up the CI version and
Python 'supported' version, it kept breaking. 
I note that RHEL7 ends 'maintenance' in June 2024, just after the 4.20
release March 2024
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/end-maintenance-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7-almost-here
Those dates I think give good cause to drop CentOS 7, but other views
still welcome.
Andrew,

-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.orgSamba Team Lead                https://catalyst.net.nz/services/sambaCatalyst.Net Ltd
Proudly developing Samba for Catalyst.Net Ltd - a Catalyst IT group
company
Samba Development and Support: https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba
Catalyst IT - Expert Open Source Solutions