EPEL Proposal: Removal of PPC64 (Not PPC64le) in 2019-06-01

TL; DR:

EPEL is looking to put its EL6 and EL7 branches of PPC64 into archives by 2019-06-01. This is due to the fact that Fedora no longer builds for the PPC64 big-endian architecture.

The long story

As of the EOL of Fedora 28, the Fedora Project no longer supports or builds packages for the big endian Power64 (or ppc64) architecture. Kevin Fenzi went over this in his blog article, but I wanted to go over it again. I realize this is short notice so extra steps need to be done.

The Fedora Project uses Fedora Linux on its builders which is useful for bringing on new architectures, and for getting new features which RHEL does not have yet. However it means that when an OS is End of Lifed, it no longer gets security updates, software improvements, or similar fixes. We could try and stand up an EL7 builder but it would require reworking both tools and scripts that are expecting an F28 world (python3, various newer libraries and scripts, different API's, etc). That would take a while to rework everything back and then continual work of keeping this builder in line with whatever EL8/F30+ world we move to in the coming months. Secondly, this would cut out a limited resource. We only have so many PPC8 systems which we can run PPC64 virtual machines on. The virtual machines can either build an EPEL package or a Fedora <29 be="" but="" down="" epel.="" just="" limiting="" p="" package="" this="" to="" we="" would="">
In the end, the number of PPC64 users are not that great. We have an average of 90 systems per day checking in with many more PPC64LE systems. I think most of the PPC64 users would be able to get stuff from archives just as well.

How do I get my stuff

The builds for EL6.10 and EL7.6 will be archived to /pub/archives/epel/7/7.6 and /pub/archives/epel/6/6.10 this week. We may need to roll out an updated epel-release which will point this architecture to that tree. We will then remove the builders from Fedora and stop building for it. In early July I will remove the remaining trees from /pub/epel and put in redirects to the archives.