[yocto] Dropping Debian 7 as supported?

[Richard Purdie]

On Sat, 2016-02-13 at 10:12 -0800, Khem Raj wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2016-02-13 at 15:30 +0100, Jens Rehsack wrote:
> > > > Am 11.02.2016 um 15:32 schrieb Burton, Ross <
> > > > ross.burton at intel.com>
> > > > :
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > On 11 February 2016 at 14:21, Nick Leverton <nick at leverton.org>
> > > > wrote:
> > > > Possibly a little early - Debian 7 will be going onto LTS
> > > > security
> > > > support for
> > > > two years, starting some time this month.  Quoting from
> > > > https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
> > > > 
> > > > Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the LTS project and was looking at
> > > > the
> > > > security team.
> > > > 
> > > > This does make it less clear, but it's still an old release and
> > > > we
> > > > can't support/test on everything.
> > > 
> > > Sure, but are there some serious/expensive maintaining efforts
> > > continuing support Debian 7?
> > > Or is it an approach to kick Debian from list of supported
> > > distributions for (above?) reasons?
> > > 
> > > Since I run some build instances on a Debian 7 machine which is
> > > not
> > > going to be upgraded that
> > > soon (don't want Debian 8, but don't want to reinstall from
> > > scratch
> > > and migrate my Xen VM's ...),
> > > dropping support for "it's just time to move on" is more a
> > > Desktop
> > > philosophy, not for embedded/datacenter
> > > approaches ...
> > 
> > For example, we'd like to use the sparse option when building
> > rootfs:
> > 
> > https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9099
> > 
> > This support isn't available in the version of dd in debian 7. Our
> > options are:
> > 
> > * Build a dd -native
> 
> For core feature like sparse files its better to control our own 
> destiny and use dd-native regardless.

There are certain core utilities which its very hard to add into the
dependency chains correctly. With xz, I recently gave up trying to get
the patches right. I'm sure it could be done, it didn't seem worth the
effort though. dd and other coreutils fall into the same category, very
hard to get right without races. There is probably a redesign of the
some of the way staging happens needed to make it work and that is a
low priority right now.

>  But that does not mean we should
> not drop debian7 or arcane centos distros that we keep supporting for
> ever. I still see patches for centos 5.8 in metadata.

We did retire centos 6 recently (qemu wouldn't run there correctly for
any of the automated tests).

Cheers,

Richard