EPEL Minor Version End of Life

Description

Each minor release of EPEL is maintained as laid out in the EPEL policy.

At the conclusion of the maintenance period, an EPEL release enters "End of Life" status, also known as retirement. This procedure describes the tasks necessary to move a release to that status.

Preparatory steps

Send announcement

Before the actual retirement takes place, send a reminder to the epel-devel@ list that it will be happening soon. You can use this email as a reference.

We’re not able to declare a specific date for the retirement because it is dependent on the RHEL schedule. As a rough guideline, try to send the reminder announcement at the beginning of the month in which the next RHEL minor version is expected to occur.

Prepare ansible changes

Some of the EOL process is controlled by ansible playbooks. Before these are run some changes will be needed in the ansible repo. Set these up ahead of time in a pull request, which will be merged on EOL day. These changes should include:

  • vars/all/EPEL.yaml

    • change the epel_branched_minor variable to false

    • change the epel_z_minor variable to 2

  • roles/bodhi2/backend/files/new-updates-sync

    • remove the epel10.1 section of the RELEASES dictionary

  • roles/batcave/files/rhel10-sync

    • change 10.1 to 10.2 in RELEASEVERS

You can use this pull request as a reference.

RHEL buildroot pre-seeding

To speed up the sync of RHEL infra repos, pre-seed the RHEL 10.2 directory on batcave01 by copying the 10.1 directory.

$ cd /mnt/fedora/app/fi-repo/rhel/rhel10
$ mkdir 10.2
$ rsync -avH --link-dest=$PWD/10.1/repos 10.1/repos/ 10.2/repos/

EOL day

Send announcement

Reply to the previous announcement to state that the mass branching is starting. Also send the corresponding mail archive link to the #epel:fedoraproject.org matrix channel.

Koji tasks

Disable builds by removing targets.

$ koji remove-target epel10.1
$ koji remove-target epel10.1-candidate

Remove any existing sidetags from the EOL release.

$ koji remove-sidetag $(koji list-sidetags --basetag epel10.1-build)

This must be done with koji remove-sidetag and not koji remove-target because just removing the target of a sidetag will leave it in a weird state where it cannot be removed.

Final stable push

Do a final stable push for the EPEL-10.1 release in Bodhi, following the Pushing Updates SOP.

Bodhi tasks

Run the following bodhi commands to set the EPEL-10.1 release to the archived state.

$ bodhi releases edit --name EPEL-10.1 --state archived

Merge ansible changes

Merge the pending ansible pull request.

Run the playbooks

Run the following playbooks to apply the changes made in ansible.

$ sudo rbac-playbook groups/batcave.yml
$ sudo rbac-playbook groups/bodhi-backend.yml
$ sudo rbac-playbook groups/koji-hub.yml
$ sudo rbac-playbook -t all,rollout openshift-apps/bodhi.yml

You will need to have someone enable sshd on autosign02 and then run:

$ sudo rbac-playbook manual/autosign.yml

And then someone with the robosignatory passphrase will need to restart it.

Manually sync RHEL repos

Normally RHEL repos are synced via a cron job, but run them manually the first time to ensure completion. Run the sync script on batcave01:

$ sudo /mnt/fedora/app/fi-repo/rhel/rhel10/rhel10-sync

Koji tasks again

Remove the CentOS snapshot external repos.

$ koji remove-external-repo c10-snapshot-baseos    epel10.2-base
$ koji remove-external-repo c10-snapshot-appstream epel10.2-base
$ koji remove-external-repo c10-snapshot-crb       epel10.2-base

Add the RHEL 10.2 external repos.

$ koji add-external-repo \
      --mode bare \
      --priority 10 \
      --tag epel10.2-base \
      rhel10.2-baseos \
      'https://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/repo/rhel/rhel10/10.2/repos/$arch/baseos/'
$ koji add-external-repo \
      --mode bare \
      --priority 20 \
      --tag epel10.2-base \
      rhel10.2-appstream \
      'https://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/repo/rhel/rhel10/10.2/repos/$arch/appstream/'
$ koji add-external-repo \
      --mode bare \
      --priority 30 \
      --tag epel10.2-base \
      rhel10.2-crb \
      'https://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/repo/rhel/rhel10/10.2/repos/$arch/crb/'

Move epel10z floating tag to next minor version.

$ koji remove-tag-inheritance epel10z epel10.1
$ koji add-tag-inheritance epel10z epel10.2

Move epel10-infra floating tag to next minor version.

$ koji remove-tag-inheritance epel10-infra epel10.1-build
$ koji add-tag-inheritance epel10-infra epel10.2-build

Mirror tasks

Log into the MirrorManager Admin Panel and reconfigure the repository redirects as follows.

  • epel-z-10 → epel-z-10.2

  • epel-z-debug-10 → epel-z-debug-10.2

  • epel-z-source-10 → epel-z-source-10.2

  • epel-z-testing-10 → epel-z-testing-10.2

  • epel-z-testing-debug-10 → epel-z-testing-debug-10.2

  • epel-z-testing-source-10 → epel-z-testing-source-10.2

Run the following commands on batcave01 to switch symlinks on the mirrors.

$ sudo ln -sfn 10.2 /pub/epel/10z
$ sudo ln -sfn 10.2 /pub/epel/testing/10z

Koschei

Remove the EPEL 10.1 collection in koschei.

To be able do this, you will first need to log into os-control01 and run the following commands to get into the console.

$ oc project koschei
$ oc rsh deploy/admin

After that, you will be able to delete the EPEL 10.1 collection using the koschei-admin tool.

$ koschei-admin delete-collection --force epel10.1

Send announcement

Announce the completion of the retirement. Post this to Fedora Discussion in the Project Discussion category with the #epel-sig tag. Also send an email to the epel-devel@ and devel@ lists.

Consider Before Running

  • Resource contention in infrastructure, such as outages

  • Extenuating circumstances for specific planned updates, if any

  • Send the reminder announcement, if it isn’t sent already

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