Fedora: How a release is archived. [Fedora 22 moving to archives]

This week has been the week of Fedora Flock in beautiful Krakow, Poland. Due to other travels, I was unable to attend which meant that I have been focusing this week on getting some outstanding tasks done that had been delayed on my part. One of those tasks was getting Fedora 22 ready for being permanently archived.

A Fedora release has many stages in its life.

1. An embryo in rawhide, 
2. A larva in alpha/beta/rc modes, 
3. A pupa at release time 
4. A short mature life as an imago while the next release  is in its pupil stage. 
5. Then like all things, the release shuffles off this mortal coil and gets moved to the afterlife in the Fedora Archives.   

The Fedora Archives are a hidden resource for people needing to find some older package or to try and track a history of packages. I use it quite extensively for building packages for EPEL ( a post for later ) or to try and find the 'last' workable version of some software as various things in Fedora evolved past the Enterprise Linux release.

The steps for archiving a release are pretty straight forward:

1.  Before version N+2 goes into beta, hardlink copy with cp -l the version N from /pub/fedora/linux/releases/N into /pub/archive/fedora/linux/N. This allows for any mirrors who do slow updates of the archive tree to start getting the data moved over in their trees.
2. A couple of weeks after version N+2 has been released, version N is End of Lifed and no more updates will be done. At this point we can do a hardlink copy of /pub/fedora/linux/updates/N and /pub/fedora/linux/updates/testing/N to /pub/archive
3. A week later we log into the mirrormanager tool and change the point where F-N updates are pointing to the archive version. This means that systems still looking for updates will not get 404's but will be directed to a mirror of the archives.
4. We then remove the data from the main Fedora disk space.

We can do this because /pub/fedora, /pub/archive and /pub/epel are all on one disk which allows for us to hardlink them together and if a mirror is doing a rsync -avSHP of the trees they should not have to transfer as much data because of the hardlinks. 

In any case, I have started the archive of Fedora 22 and next Friday will complete the archival by moving the pointers in mirrormanager. Thank you Fedora 22 for your service.

An end of life release