[EPEL-devel] PSA: Enterprise Linux 5 End of Production on 2017-03-31 and EPEL.
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PSA: Enterprise Linux 5 End of Production on 2017-03-31 and EPEL.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux builds its current releases around a 4 part
lifecycle model.
* Production 1. New drivers and features are added during this cycle
along with security and production bug fixes.
* Production 2. Only security and production bug fixes are done
during this cycle.
* Production 3. Only security and 'critical' bug fixes are done.
* Extended Lifecycle Support. Security and critical bug fixes are
only released to customers who are paying for this extra level of
support. For rebuild Linuxes like CentOS and Scientific Linux the
product is now End of Lifed.
The last time this happened was in 2012 with the end of life of
Enterprise Linux 4. At that time, EPEL stopped supporting builds for
EL-4 but no other changes were done. This wasn't a big deal because
EL-4 had never gotten a large number of users. However in 1 year, 1
month, EL-5 will reach the end of its production run and move into
Extended Life Support. Enterprise 5 is still over 20% of all EPEL
installs so I wanted to give a long heads up that EL-5 will also be
removed from the builders on April 1 2017 and no builds will be done
after that. Depending on other proposals, EL-5 may also be moved over
to an 'archive' like Fedora releases are so that it is clear that it
is no longer under any production. If that happens there will be clear
notice of where it has been moved to and how to keep at it.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.