A general plea: please stop creating static, manually-updated lists of Fedora releases

Once again, I'm on a round of "branching happened and all these things
that have static lists of Fedora releases didn't notice".

Exhibit A: https://gitlab.com/fedora/bootc/base-images/-/work_items/83
Exhibit B: https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/2210
Exhibit C: https://gitlab.com/fedora/bootc/base-images/-/blob/main/RELEASE.md#part-3-managing-fedora-versions-in-konflux

yes these all happen to be bootc/coreos-related, but there are plenty
of offenders, that's just where I'm looking today.

The Fedora release cycle moves quite fast. Something important happens
approximately every two months: a release branches, or goes stable, or
goes EOL. You are not going to reliably keep up with this manually, and
you should not be trying.

There are two fairly solid ways you can check on what releases exist
and what state they're in:

1. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/releases
2. https://fedorapeople.org/groups/qa/metadata/release.json

The former has more information but requires a bit more effort to work
with. The latter is minimal but easy to work with (all you really need
to know is that, if the 'branched' list is empty, rawhide maps to
'highest stable plus 1'; if branched is populated, rawhide maps to
'highest branched plus 1'). Both are ultimately manually updated, but
the relevant releng SOPs now all have "update these things" in them, so
they get updated reliably. Certainly more reliably than your manual
list.

It would be really, really great if, when folks are inventing new
things like this, they would handle this smartly. Either do not *have*
a "list of known releases" at all, or ensure there is a reliable,
automated process that updates it.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @[email protected]
https://www.happyassassin.net



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