 Okay. Welcome to Jenkins documentation office hours. Today is the February 16th edition here in 2023 for you and us. Today, we have myself, Mark, wait, I am Bruno Rockton. Welcome. And thank you all for joining as well as I appreciate it always. For the agenda, a couple, a couple notes here. So one, we have the January newsletter was published last week. We have an update on the GSOC preparation and a link to the blog post that John Mark had written just a couple weeks ago. We have the Jenkins awards for 2023. These have just been opened and we'll go into a little bit of info on how to participate. There's discussion about the documentary documentation transition to Java 17. We're approaching fast. So talking about getting that put into the documentation as a basis to use. And then something that Mark and I had been discussing previously, an end of life checklist for documentation so making sure that if something reaches end of life, we're making sure that we can update and remove any instances that we need to. And then there's some information regarding the sento seven end of life is just a proposal at this point in time. So just discussion, nothing moving just yet. And Mark has added a note about end of life website and Jenkins. So we'll check in when we get to that point and Mark can tell us more about that. That's okay. And then also that we need to add to the agenda or does that cover everything for the most part. Great for me. Let's see our and we're being recorded right given you've got a recording on. That is correct is recording. So, first things first, again, action items just the January newsletter was recently published. We all had our big big 22 recap newsletter in January and this math month we just want to share again what we always want to share highlights from around Jenkins and important updates from the Sega leaders. And just real quickly, big thank you and shout out to Roxanne from CD foundation for creating these header images really spices up the blog post and appreciate the branding it's really nice. So Google summer of code is approaching as well. We've, we're submitting our organization application, I think within the next day or two. So, we're, we'll find out next week on the 22nd, who what the organizations are that will be part of the Google summer of code. We're expecting Jenkins to be announced as that. But if there is some reason that it's not, we'll go from there but we're expecting to be part of Google summer of code this year. And there will be, there's additional timelines for Google summer code but everything's going to happen after the, the organization participation announcement so we'll discuss that when it comes down. Next up so the Jenkins awards for 2023 have officially opened. These have been. These are now three separate GitHub issues that Alyssa Tong has opened up. And we have one for most valuable Jenkins contributor, the Jenkins security MVP, and the most valuable Jenkins advocate. Each of these issues is its own separate conversation area to nominate and discuss candidates for that award specifically. Previously we would host this on the CD foundation site repo. This year the projects are hosting them themselves, which is why we have these issues on GitHub this year. So we've gone ahead and created a label specifically for community stuff so that we can tag things accordingly and make sure that people see that this is something for everyone to participate in as opposed to an issue to resolve or something like that. Nominations are completely open so you can make your case nominate whoever you would like to and there's information here there's some instructions and one thing to be aware of is that the last year's winners cannot win the same award this year. So, for example, for the most valuable Jenkins contributor Basil one last year so you can't win this year unfortunately, but you can still be nominated for the other thing so yeah anyone can still, you can nominate anyone. So everything's open and then voting will take place via Google form once the nomination period has closed. That is March 3rd. So that Friday March 3rd is when nominations close and voting will open the following week, and we'll close at the end of March. And then the results will be announced at CD con, along with presenting the winners with their awards. So, lots to look forward to. This is something since we're hosting them in our repository it's something new for this year, but they're there it's a great opportunity to really highlight and show gratitude and appreciation for someone that's done a lot for Jenkins this past year. So if you have anyone in mind please go ahead and submit a nomination. Next up, the documentation transition to Java 17. So this is something that's going to be happening in around April May with the newest Debian 12 release. So, we're going to transition to using Java 17 in the documentations for installation and other processes. So this is not to say that Java 7 Java 11 support is being dropped, but we now support Java 11 and 17 and with 17 being having more functionality and being more newer. The idea is that we move people and encourage people to get on to Java 17 sooner than later. So we can avoid a lot smoother and there's less worry down the line as time moves on when things approach end of life. We can avoid a lot of that if we be, if we are proactive about it now. And this is going to be across all the Jenkins documentation this won't be just installing but this is something that we'll have to work and develop as we get closer and closer to that date. And one thing that I'm going to be doing is emailing Tim to home and letting him know about this transition so that there are no surprises he is release officer so it's better to make sure everyone's on the same page and aware of what's going on, as opposed to surprises. And then, again, this is something that Mark and I were just discussing, but having an end of life checklist is something that we can really consider and probably should have with things approaching end of life. There are a handful of things coming up within the next 12 months or so. So, boom to 18 alpine 3.14 and 3.15. Those three are all going to be happening this year. And so we want to make sure that we can check throughout the Jenkins site repository and any other locations that they might contain some of this information or documentation and ensure that it's updated or removed. This can cause issues down the line if things are not updated accordingly, or it could be misinforming users who are trying to perform many of the actions here in Jenkins. So, this is a big one. This is really important to make sure is taken care of prior to any big release and any release at all but this is something that I think is a great idea and something that I want to work on and get created so that we have that that just that piece of mind going forward. And then these are some of the places that we were discussing checking so stuff like obviously documentation, the packaging sites and repository. The release repository again for things that if there are, is there's tooling that depends on certain versions of it and that version is reaching end of life, we can run into issues so that's another big one container images and the Jenkins updates site. So, we've got a great list going if there are more places to we can check or that we should be checking and more than happy to entertain everything. Please, you know, drop a message here at it as a comment, send me a message. Regardless, this is something that we want to make sure is front of mind when these major changes come. Next up is the prep for Cento seven and of life. So, Mark, I was wondering if you'd be okay speaking to you a little bit. I know, but yeah, so the, the idea here is that Cento seven, the Jenkins project officially only supports operating systems which are supported by the upstream provider. If an upstream provider in support the Jenkins project in support for that thing. So that means that Cento seven would officially be supported until June of 2024. However, we're seeing the erosion of support for Cento seven elsewhere in the world. And with that erosion of support and my personal biases against it. It's weighing in that I think we ought to consider dropping it. So, some of the compelling things to say there are. Hey, our RPM installer doesn't support it now. We deliver a Docker container, we deliver one or more Docker container images with Cento seven, but the upstream of Cento seven container image on which we are building has been un-maintained and deprecated since late 2022. So we're building on on something that our own standards say we would not support the upstream doesn't is not maintained and therefore we should we should consider getting rid of it. So the steps I think they're needed is I think this one I'm going to go ahead and propose a Jenkins enhancement proposal, a JEP that suggests to accelerate the end of life for Cento seven. Now that doesn't mean it's immediate it rather means we will go through a systematic discipline process to drop and clarify to people that we are dropping support for Cento seven. And then we'll be overjoyed when we get to the day that it is dropped, but we're not there yet. And I did, and I did, I did do some work on this. So the documentation references to Centos seven to be removed. I submitted a poll request to reduce the Cento seven and references in our documentation. I was surprised at how relatively few there were. And it wasn't nearly as dismaying as I thought it was going to be there, there just weren't that many, that many places where we referred to Cento seven. And where we did it was a good thing to say, hey, let's add Alma Linux and Rocky Linux, because they are also valid clones of their valid red hat style distributions. Yeah, and we can see here in the poll request this is the one you're referring to everything's, it's been merged already and everything's updated so that that's great thank you very much for taking that on. Well, and now one, one positive there is it means the video that showed how to install on Cento seven is now gone. It was replaced with how to install on Rocky nine, which is a current version of the operating system so it was it was nice that Darren had done a replacement video. Nice. Darren such a good guy he always comes in when he needs to. So great. Cool. All right, thank you very much Mark. And this kind of goes back into the end of life checklist and everything that we were discussing as well so super relevant super applicable to things that we want to accomplish and set up and template out eventually so Yeah, super important thank you very much. And then, Mark I noticed you'd put this this last item on here the end of life website Jenkins. Yeah so could you could you click that Kevin and let's talk about it for a minute so one of the challenges for me is how do I know when things are reaching end of life. And other people had this challenge and somebody created this open source open main maintained website called end of life dot date. And it's actually so good that I've been using it for months now without realizing that it was entirely an open source effort. I thought oh somebody was really nice some business did the very nice thing turns out it's not a business at all somebody just did this because they had a question they wanted to they wanted to solve their question and they found a way to present it very clearly So the person that interacted with me is actually someone I've interacted with in the Jenkins community in years past. So it was, oh wow that's cool this is a name I recognize. So, so what you see on the left is various products, and their end of life and so if you scroll down Kevin you can find Jenkins here. I've read only a few days ago to the list but here you see what it's showing is a brief description of Jenkins and then category the type of release it's documenting how long ago it was released. Is it currently supported and what's its version number. The story that's being told here is that we support the current weekly release 2.391. We support the current LTS line currently 2.375.3. We do not support those older versions. So if there are some kind of automation. You don't have to make. Okay, because I don't see you come each and every week say I'm changing. Right. And that's, and that's part of the elegance of this thing right is that the weekly version number I did nothing to update that and it's going to it should just keep up to date. Likewise the latest on the LTS line should keep up to date. The thing that my pull request was changing was the original layout that the first creator had done confused me, and I was able to persuade him that hey we should change this layout to look more like Alpine's layout so if Kevin if you'll click the Alpine Linux on the left you'll see how similar we are to Alpine Linux. What's the latest release when it was released. Does it have green or red, and what's the latest version. And if you were to look at Debbie and you'd see it's we look a lot like Debbie and as well. Right so it's, it's the same pattern of okay let's, let's look like these other very popular open source projects. Now we're not nearly as exotic exhaustive as for instance if you look at a product that has strong commercial backing that you Ubuntu all the way at the bottom. This one has a commercial life cycle and has a hardware component and has all sorts of things that go with commercial operating systems right and, and so it represents that in a much more complex and much more useful for its consumers way. But for us I think the simple presentation we're using is a lot better, and we don't we certainly don't have this kind of tiered life cycle that Ubuntu does for theirs. Mark, sorry, I have an idea. Not that good, but we have the king of automation in the Jenkins team you know, and I was wondering if we could use that API because it looks like this website has an API that we know that some components or OS version that we are using are not supported anymore and put them automatically in the documentation or even in our containers or you know that what you wanted to do with the JEP you know no matter message detecting that the OS we are running on is not supported anymore or things like that. Good, good, good suggestion. It might be an interesting exploration. I, I think this is actually a static website generated without presenting API. Yeah, but right so so, but by all means click the API link Kevin let's let's explore it I don't know what, what it provides as an API but it, if, if that provides us why not. Yes, it provides a rabbit hole. That's for sure. Well, and, and hey, that rabbit hole is quite helpful because for me, for instance as the maintainer of the platform label or plug in. I keep track of the end of life dates of project of operating systems so that I know when to say it's unsupported, but this API, if it can really answer that may then be able to fill in these fields. So the cool, I don't have to bother with it anymore. A little bit of GitHub action maybe and good to go. Well, actually in this case they're just, they're just JSON requests so no, no, yeah, I'll just put them into my Jenkins file. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, and go ahead, Kevin. Oh, no, I was just gonna say looking at the responses it looks like you do get all the information that's available there through the API so right. It does look like it's available and usable at the very least. What it takes them. Yeah, I'm not 100% yeah well and at good point so why not. Let's let's do some looking and consider because we certainly already are doing website generation. Right. Our site generator is a program. And the fact that it generates a static site is not a barrier to this kind of thing because we could read this data and insert injected into the static site. Mm hmm. Yeah. Cool. And I'm thinking to this, this could potentially even tie back into what we're talking about with the end of life checklist and can help us facilitate that by telling us hey these are all the things that are end of life at this time. Great. Now I know what to look for. And so, yeah, I mean, that sort of thing would be really neat to have integrated into it. In genius idea Bruno. Well, well thought. Good. You're welcome. As long as I don't have to implement it. Let's get there first, but maybe. So that takes care of everything that I had on my agenda for Docs office hours. Is there anything else that we want to talk about or any other items that we want to add on here. That's all for me. That's all for me too. Okay, well, if that's okay with everyone, then on interest of time, we'll call it here. Thank you very much as always the recording will be available in 24 to 48 hours. And have a great rest of your day. Thanks for joining and take care. Thank you.