Re: [docs] [PATCH 0/2] drop Debian 11 from supported distros

["Antonin Godard" <antonin.godard@bootlin.com>]

On Thu Sep 18, 2025 at 3:45 PM CEST, Ross Burton via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
> On 18 Sep 2025, at 14:00, Antonin Godard <antonin.godard@bootlin.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu Sep 18, 2025 at 12:03 PM CEST, Quentin Schulz via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
>>> Reading a bit more the docs, I'm wondering if we shouldn't add Debian 11
>>> to the list of "distros we supported but we don't anymore" for older
>>> releases in the docs, e.g. kirkstone, scarthgap and walnascar if we
>>> really are dropping Debian 11 from the builders?
>>
>> Yes, basically if the Autobuilder workers for debian-11 are turned off
>> completely (not even run for stable branch), we can move it below the
>>
>>  Finally, here are the distribution versions which were previously
>>  tested on former revisions of "&DISTRO_NAME;", but no longer are:
>>
>> sentence in system-requirements.rst.
>>
>> However if we still run workers for stable branches, we can move it under the
>> second sentence:
>>
>>  The following distribution versions are still tested, even though the
>>  organizations publishing them no longer make updates publicly available:
>>
>> Let's wait until the patch from Ross gets merged on Poky and see what is done
>> with the workers.
>
> I was meant to speak to you about this, as RP had concerns that the scripts
> that compare the AB setup with the docs won’t like this.
>
> We want to keep debian-11 around for walnascar and earlier, but not build on
> it for master/whinlatter onwards.  I know we can do this for the AB, but is
> the script that keeps the docs in sync with the AB happy with this too?

For master, the script has a logic to detect when a worker is configured on the
AB but not listed in SANITY_TESTED_DISTROS, to avoid forgetting to update the
file. It looks in all_workers in config.py[1]. So I think it will be an issue.

But I wonder how are you going to configure the worker to run _only_ on
walnascar and earlier? Remove it from workers_debian[2] in config.py and leave
it in workers_prev_release[3]? Does that make the AB automatically pick a
debian11 builder for stable branches?

We could maybe solve this by adding a "master" entry to workers_prev_releases
(we could rename that variable too), and have master run on all the available
workers in all_workers minus the one we want to drop.

To illustrate, something like:

workers_prev_releases = {
    "master": all_workers.remove("debian11*"),
    "walnascar" : ("alma8", "alma9", "debian11", "debian12", "fedora39", "fedora40", "fedora41", "opensuse155", "opensuse156", "rocky8", "rocky9", "stream9", "ubuntu2004","ubuntu2204", "ubuntu2304", "ubuntu2404", "ubuntu2410", "perf-"),
    ...
}

And then the script can be adapted to read from this dict no matter if it's
master or a stable branch.

[1]: https://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-autobuilder2/tree/config.py?id=b9db368e79c5d761c3e6c1fea8697914fc5fe930#n198
[2]: https://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-autobuilder2/tree/config.py?id=b9db368e79c5d761c3e6c1fea8697914fc5fe930#n183
[3]: https://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-autobuilder2/tree/config.py?id=b9db368e79c5d761c3e6c1fea8697914fc5fe930#n201

Antonin

-- 
Antonin Godard, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com