fesco

#2803 Missing EOL notification
Closed: Invalid by sgallagh. Opened by name.

Closed: Invalid
Reopen Issue

AFAIK right now when Fedora reaches EOL nothing is visible for the user, they just stop receiving updates - that's doesn't sound good at all, because it means the user may continue using Fedora without realizing they are running an OS with lots of vulnerabilities.

Would be great if DNF had an option of pushing a certain package once Fedora reaches EOL and this package could e.g. add a notification via the console login prompt, via a BASH override, via a desktop notification, via whatever means possible.

There's an additional issue though. Once Fedora reaches EOL its mirrors are normally shut down which means once you decide to install it anew, you'll never know it's not supported at all. Perhaps, a better solution would be to include a certain package by default for all installations. This package could contain a daemon which polls the Fedora website and checks whether the distro is still supported or not. That sounds like a better solution than the one outlined in the previous paragraph.

E.g. you may have https://fedoraproject.org/supported which has just this:
Fedora 35
Fedora 36

Easy to download, minimal traffic, easy to parse and compare with the currently installed OS. In case this location changes in the future it will still work, as the daemon will fail to retrieve this file which ultimately means the distro is no longer supported.

By default, EOL releases are transparently switched to the Fedora archive mirror network.

That said, we do have APIs for determining EOL state and we could do something to trigger this in desktops/shell motd/etc.

However, this is something that probably makes sense to bring up with the Workstation WG, KDE SIG, Server and Cloud WGs, etc. for their point of views on how to implement such a thing.

FESCo doesn't direct this sort of thing, we operate as arbiters for stuff the community proposes through the Change process.

Part of this sounds like a RFE for dnf/createrepo... some kind of 'still supported' bit for respositories and if it's not set dnf could warn about using no longer supported repos? But thats something to discuss with dnf / createrepo maintainers...

As for telling when a release is EOL, thats possible, but what to do about that is a much more difficult question. In any case, I'd advise taking this discussion to the devel list and/or dnf/createrepo...

/cc @msuchy

Not me. Rather cc @jmracek

Oh, I thought you might have ideas because you worked on the script for retired packages…

I understand. Though, I agree with Kevin that dnf/createrepo is the best place.

Thank you very much for including me into the discussion. I understand the value of such an information and this is not the first place where EOL is discussed. Recently modularity tried to address the similar issue by creating a new metadata document that contains EOL information for modules or obsolete information (https://github.com/fedora-modularity/libmodulemd/blob/main/yaml_specs/modulemd_obsoletes_v1.yaml). The advantage of metadata solution is that it does not require installation of any package.
There is one huge problem with some solutions that Fedora community can agree on. They can be too specific for Fedora or used only by Fedora. Such a solution is not nice for the upstream and hard to maintain in the downstream. I will be happy when RHEL and Fedora will use the same framework to provide distro specific information to the users.

Folks, I am not convinced this is the best forum for this discussion.

May I recommend bringing it to the devel mailing list?

Please bring this discussion to a wider forum. The devel mailing list or discussion.fedoraproject.org would be preferable.

Metadata Update from @sgallagh:
- Issue close_status updated to: Invalid
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/YLFAJNIUNY3U6FFOYGRBCROW4WB36L6I/
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