Upcoming CI changes - transition to VM based CI

[Luigi Toscano]

Ben Cooksley ha scritto:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 8:56 PM Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org
> <mailto:aacid at kde.org>> wrote:
> 
>     El dimarts, 10 de juny del 2025, a les 9:31:55 (Hora d’estiu d’Europa
>     central), Ben Cooksley va escriure:
>     > > > My concern is that if we keep pushing out terminating support those
>     > > > projects will just keep deferring their porting.
>     > > > Note that Frameworks 6 released in Feb 2024, so they've had 15 months so
>     > > > far to port which is a pretty reasonable amount of time.
>     > >
>     > > As something to compare to, we kept shipping kdelibs4 based apps in KDE
>     > > Gear
>     > > until April 2018 when KDE Frameworks 5.0 was released in July 2014.
>     > >
>     > > That's almost 4 years, I am not asking for that, it's not that 15 months
>     > > is a
>     > > reasonable time or not, it's that we never set a line on the sand and thus
>     > > it's easy to keep postponing it because it's not "there yet". So I would
>     > > propose setting a date in the sand when we will stop supporting Qt5 stuff
>     > > in
>     > > our CI system. My proposal would be the end of 2025.
>     >
>     > I'd like it to be a bit earlier than that if we can - say 30 September.
>     > Quite a few applications have made it off since the initial effort to start
>     > pulling the plug and another bunch have been pulled out in response to the
>     > recent effort to remove Qt 5 CI support.
> 
>     If we announce it *now*, i guess 30 of September would be ok-ish...
> 
>     ... but once we've (you've really) done the work to support it, is it a
>     hassle
>     to keep it on for 3 months more?
> 
> 
> It's mainly a case of when it stops building again due to more packages being
> dropped. 
> While distros keep packages in place things aren't so bad, but as they
> continue to work through purging Qt 5 software from their repositories it is
> inevitable that packages our software depends on will also be dropped which
> will break the image again.

If I understand it correctly the problem here is the usage of distributions
which removes packages, so kind of rolling.
But just for the purposes of keeping KF5, wouldn't it make sense to use a
distribution which an LTS release, where the base is not going to change at
least for the last year?

Ciao
-- 
Luigi