Proposal: Drop support for Ubuntu 14.04 when EOL'd on April 30, 2019

[Philipp Wollermann]

Hi,

Bazel currently officially supports and tests Linux releases on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be EOL'd by Canonical on April 30, 2019, which means unless one subscribes to their commercial "extended security maintenance" plan, there will be no more security updates.

I suggest that Bazel and Bazel CI drop support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on May 1, 2019. If this would cause developers or users big problems, please let me know why. (Note that we might still have to go ahead with the plan in case of security concerns.)

The following action plan would get us there:

- From today until April 30, 2019: Existing developers that use Bazel's CI to test their projects or build releases on Ubuntu 14.04 should add an additional config to build / test on Ubuntu 16.04 or later and make sure that their project can be tested and built successfully on Ubuntu 16.04 or later.

- May 1, 2019: Bazel EngProd team will send PRs to remove Ubuntu 14.04 from CI configs to all projects.

- May 1, 2019: Bazel's release pipeline configuration will be modified to build / test Linux releases on Ubuntu 16.04 instead of Ubuntu 14.04.

- May 8, 2019 (or earlier if the migration completes earlier): We will remove support for Ubuntu 14.04 from Bazel's CI.

This would have the following implications:

- We no longer test and thus support building Bazel on Ubuntu 14.04. If Bazel's build breaks on that platform at some point in time, the Bazel team will not fix it. We might accept PRs that fix the build. It might break again in the future, because we no longer test it.

- Bazel's official Linux binaries built on May 1st or later will be built on Ubuntu 16.04 instead of 14.04, which will probably break backwards compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04.

- With the newly freed resources, we could add new platforms (e.g. the latest non-LTS Ubuntu, CentOS, Arch Linux, ...) to Bazel's CI. I'm open for suggestions what you'd like to see here. :)

Bazel users and developers: Please let me know what you think and if you have any concerns about this.

Cheers,

Philipp

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[markus....@ecosia.org]

Dropping 14.04 sounds good to me, just in time to save me a bit of work on the git repo cache PR. Given that some of our team members use non-LTS Ubuntu that would be my preferred vote for CI.

[Tony Aiuto]

+1 to droping it.

The case for people using LTS versions of software past EOL is generally to support deployed systems. The goal is to minimize risk by minimizing change. They are unlikely to be adopters of new development tools, and less likely to want to keep up with each fresh release.

As far as using the freed resources, we may need those and even more to support testing for the full Federation. But the choice of what to put on CI for that is a different discussion.

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[Philipp Wollermann]

Hi,

considering that there was no negative feedback, I'll go ahead with this. Some changes to the project configurations and infrastructure took longer so I won't meet the originally mentioned deadline here.

Bazel 0.26 will still be built on and support Ubuntu 14.04. Bazel 0.27 will be the first release to be built on Ubuntu 16.04 instead. If that causes anyone problems, please let me know and we can discuss options.

I will also add an entry to the Bazel 0.27 release notes to make sure that this will be mentioned clearly as an incompatible change.

If you still need to run Bazel on Ubuntu 14.04, you can just build your own binary. We no longer test on the platform, so the build might accidentally break in the future, but OTOH we don't currently have any planned changes that would make building on Ubuntu 14.04 impossible.

Cheers,

Philipp

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