Update on Modular Obsoletes and EOL change

[Martin Curlej]

Hello All,

This is an update about the Module obsoletes and EOL [1] change which we
proposed for F34. We have a little bit of a good news/bad news situation
here.

The good news is that the groundwork for the Obsoletes and EOL has been
done. DNF, libmodulemd and createrepo_c accept the format and know how to
work with it. All the technical changes are submitted (we are working on
documentation right now [2]), merged and can be tried out in rawhide. The
format definition for the obsoletes can be found here [3].

The bad news  is that we are not able to add the support of the obsolete
format to the Fedora pipeline for F34. So we are postponing it to F35 for
now.

The one thing that we need to discuss, before making changes to the Fedora
pipeline, is how the obsoletes will be used in Fedora. As the
obsoletes/lifecycles enable you to set lifecycles which are not bound to
the release cycle of a Fedora release. The Modularity team mostly cares
about the standards of the technology (i. e. what are the file formats, how
modules are built etc.)  were not here to set/mandate the policies of
metadata distribution in a release pipeline.

It would be great if we could start a discussion about how modular
obsoletes will be used in Fedora? Where will be they stored? Who will be
able to change them? Just a couple of questions to get the discussion
started. Any involvement of the Fedora community is highly appreciated.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Module_Obsoletes_and_EOL
[2] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1717
[3]
https://github.com/fedora-modularity/libmodulemd/blob/main/yaml_specs/mod...


-- 

Martin Curlej

Software Engineer, Product Owner

Modularity

Red Hat

<https://www.redhat.com>

mcurlej(a)redhat.com
<https://red.ht/sig>