~1 year to end of EPEL-7

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) are packages based off of various Fedora releases but built for the various distributions based off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In June of 2014, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (EL-7) was released and over the next several months, a focus was made to make the release of EPEL possible. Much of the work was done by Kevin Fenzi and Dennis Gilmore with some additional work by anyone else who had spare time. The initial goal was to make it that core packages needed for Fedora Infrastructure to move its core servers to EL-7 were built. That had been what had been done for the initial releases of EPEL-5 and EPEL-6, and would allow for enough base 'packages' to be built for additional packages to be added by other maintainers.

In comparison to trying to get EPEL-5 working, building for EPEL-7 was fairly easy. The initial distribution came with a large set of shipped development libraries and tooling versus getting added later. Over the years, the EL-7 distribution also gained various newer gcc toolkits via software collections which also helped EPEL maintainers to keep updating software for much of the 10 year lifecycle of EL-7. However, this maintenance has been getting harder over the last 2 years, as more and more software required either newer kernels, glibc, or other libraries that aren't available for an older operating system. [This is similar to what happened with EPEL-5 and EPEL-6 where the last year or so of the repository was more and more packages being removed due to maintenance concerns.]

This ties in with the general end of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 on June 30, 2024. While final plans for how EPEL-7 will be end of lifed, this is a general outline from how EPEL-5 and EPEL-6 were similarly ended.

1. There will be regular reminders on mailing lists that the project will no longer be supporting EL-7 after a specified date. 
2. On that date, the following will happen:
   
1. The Fedora build system will not allow any more EPEL-7 builds
2. A final push of all updates will happen to /pub/epel/7/
   
3. The current items in /pub/epel/7/ will be archived over to /pub/archive/epel/7.final/
4. Symbolic links will be made to point /pub/archive/epel/7 to the 7.final
5. The mirrormanager program which is what yum uses to look for updates will change where it points to to /pub/archive/epel/7/
6. After a week to allow mirrors to catch up, /pub/epel/7/ will be removed and a line telling people where to find the archived content.
3. Updates to lists and such explaining what happened will occur.

Why A Year Plus Notice?

EPEL-7 is the largest release that the Fedora project supports. There are about 400,000 Fedora systems seen by countme, and somewhere between 3.4 million and 6.7 million EPEL-7 users (depending on how looks at mirrormanager statistics). Going from the long tail turn off of EPEL-5 and EPEL-6 systems over the years, many of those EPEL-7 systems will take years to move to later releases. Going from past reports, many of the system administrators are not the original admins who set up the machine, and don't even know the OS or its auxiliary repositories like EPEL are no longer updated. Putting up blog posts like this can help:

• Give admins notice and a case to their management to do updates BEFORE the end of life date.
• A heads up on why scripts that mirrored content from /pub/epel/7/ will no longer work.
• Time to mirror the content locally for the inevitable reinstalls because management don't think an update to a newer release is needed.  

Whatever the case, good luck to you fellow system administrators.