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

[Christof Schmitt]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 12:08:00PM +1200, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical wrote:
> 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.

Maybe based on the comments in this thread, dropping CentOS 7 and
requiring a newer Python version could be takes as two separate steps?
Whoever is running something based on CentOS 7 might not be upgrading to
the latest Samba?

And what are the Python dependencies? That obviously affects ADDC and
testcases, but maybe not the file server and AD member parts?

Christof