PSA: Enterprise Linux 5 End of Production on 2017-03-31 and EPEL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux builds its current releases around a 4 part lifecycle model.

• Production 1. New drivers and features are added during this cycle along with security and production bug fixes.
• Production 2. Only security and production bug fixes are done during this cycle.
• Production 3. Only security and 'critical' bug fixes are done.
• Extended Lifecycle Support. Security and critical bug fixes are only released to customers who are paying for this extra level of support. For rebuild Linuxes like CentOS and Scientific Linux the product is now End of Lifed.

The last time this happened was in 2012 with the end of life of Enterprise Linux 4. At that time, EPEL stopped supporting builds for EL-4 but no other changes were done. This wasn't a big deal because EL-4 had never gotten a large number of users. However in 1 year, 1 month, EL-5 will reach the end of its production run and move into Extended Life Support. Enterprise 5 is still over 20% of all EPEL installs so I wanted to give a long heads up that EL-5 will also be removed from the builders on April 1 2017 and no builds will be done after that. Depending on other proposals, EL-5 may also be moved over to an 'archive' like Fedora releases are so that it is clear that it is no longer under any production. If that happens there will be clear notice of where it has been moved to and how to keep at it.