[poky] [PATCH] poky.conf: prune SANITY_TESTED_DISTROS

[Tom Rini]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 11:40:13AM +0000, Lock, Joshua G wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-01-24 at 10:04 -0500, Tom Rini wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 01:04:13PM +0000, Joshua Lock wrote:
> > > Remove several old/untested distros from the list:
> > > * poky-1.8 and poky-2.0 are no longer supported releases
> > > * ubuntu-14.04 is an LTS but we plan to remove it from the
> > >   project's autobuilder cluster as the kernel is old and
> > >   it doesn't use systemd -- therefore this will no longer
> > >   be tested.
> > 
> > Can you elaborate a bit more on the pain involved with supporting
> > Ubuntu
> > 14.04? 
> 
> The pain is purely from a sysadmin perspective. The Ubuntu 14.04 worker
> is causing issues for us today (it's OOMing quite a bit). We also have
> to manage it differently because it's the only system in the cluster
> that's not systemd-based.
> 
> That being said I confess I've been a bit narrow-minded with this
> patch. The SANITY_TESTED_DISTROS list is the list of distributions we
> are validating against, where validation is both build testing on the
> autobuilder and QA testing.
> 
> If Yocto Project QA are testing the 14.04 LTS then we should leave it
> in the list, if not we should remove it because we aren't testing it
> (not because we have issues, beyond manpower, with supporting it).
> 
> >  Or, do you expect to drop Ubuntu 16.04 in favour of 18.04 at
> > around this point in 2019 and continue only supporting the latest LTS
> > for Ubuntu?  I ask because supported hosts are an important part of
> > companies being able to plan their use and upgrade
> > strategies.  Thanks!
> 
> Understood. Unfortunately I don't have a good answer, but I'm trying to
> better understand QA's strategy to provide one.
> 
> At the end of the day we only have limited resources as a project and
> can only commit to testing a relatively small number of distros.

I can understand the conundrum here.  My main request is that we have
clear and documented requirements here.  If we're only going to support
the latest LTS from Ubuntu (and latest 2 non-LTS) as well as $X for
Debian, $Y for Fedora Core and $Z for openSuSE we just need to have that
documented in public so companies using us can coordinate the rest of
their Linux host support requirements.

-- 
Tom