Hi Jack,

This question is mostly for you. What is your plan for your primary Linux distro for A-Shell for the near to long term?

The "end of life" date for EL7 is close enough that we have to start the process of updating our ansible configuration to move to another distro.

Thanks in advance.

At the moment, our only plan is "all of the above". Or maybe you-ask-for-it-maybe-you'll-get-it. The only dealer/developer I'm aware of that has made a definitive decision (you may remember Matt from the Conference) is going with Debian 12. At the opposite extreme are those like René whose customers are powerful enough that they are able to dictate the decision on their own, leaving the application vendor with no choice but to support whatever the customer demands. For whatever reason, his customers seem to have stuck with RHEL/CentOS, mostly going to EL9.

I've done the port for the following:

• Ubuntu 22 LTS (64 only)
• Debian 12 (64 only)
• CentOS Stream 8/9 (32 or 64)
• RHEL 9 (32 or 64)

and am also open to the possibility of Rocky or another trying to fill the gap left by CentOS switching to the Stream model. But obviously it would be preferable to focus on fewer rather than more variations.

For those not committed to any camp, I guess my recommendation would be Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22 (which is mostly just a difference in the installer/packaging). Even though though it's a bit of a cultural shift, for example switching from yum to apt, philosophically they seem more committed to stability. And perhaps ironically, the fact that they don't support 32 bit, although presenting another potential obstacle to get over, also simplifies the environment, eliminating the confusion that we sometimes run into where there is a conflict between the 32 and 64 bit versions of some package.

I think we're leaning towards Debian 12.

How about AlmaLinux ? They are switching some of our servers to this and want to know if you will support it? thanks

We're in the process of migrating to Debian 12.

You could use docker to run on unsupported OSes.

I guess the timing is finally right for people to get serious about migration, now that CentOS/RHEL 7 is 2 days away from EOL! (In the last week we've received several versions of this kind of inquiry, although sadly, they remain all over the map.) Ty and I have started our own discussion about the best way to find a happy medium behind sanity for us (maximized by forcing everyone on to the same distribution) and flexibility/accommodation for our dealers/developers/customers (who may not always have complete control over this choice.)

As for AlmaLinux, it claims to be binary compatible with Red Hat (version 9 being relevant one now), so if you wanted to play with A-Shell on it, presumably the -el9 release would work. And besides having the stamp of approval of CERN, they do offer the ELevate tool which may make upgrading from earlier/different platforms easier. But I haven't done any experiments with it.

So at the moment, while Debian/Ubuntu remains our "recommendation", it's still the Wild West (or Have-it-your-way, depending on your preferred metaphor). But at some point in the not-too-distant future there is likely to be some effort to steer people towards a single distribution although we don't know how or even if that's going to be possible. (Differential pricing and update schedules may be part of the compromise.)

Opinions welcome! (And in the spirit of Election Season, six-figure donations to our Super PAC are also welcome!)

thanks and we get to place the decimal point wherever we want on that donation?

Absolutely! Although in the State of Idaho, it's probably best for decimal points to lean towards the Right!

True. Can you get me a efs version of the el9 maybe both 32 and 64.

One minor issue and one major one:

The minor one: Are you still using the USPS custom module? (It was only present in the -EL7 version for you and there's no point in porting it over if no longer in use.)

The major one: It may not be possible to support EFS under 64 bit. There's a component of the library for which I only have a 32 bit version and it remains to be seen whether that can be upgraded or worked around. EFS, for all of its beauty, never really caught on other than for one dealer in the financial services sector (now sold to a larger competitor), and I believe you may be the sole remaining user. I'm guessing that most developers have either decided to deal with encryption at a lower level (i.e. encrypted file system support at the OS or hardware level), or at a higher level (choosing to encrypt just selected sensitive data fields using CRYPTO or something like the string encoding routines in fnstrcode.bsi). For now, there's no crisis as you can presumably continue to use the 32 bit -EL9 version. If you give me some indication of how important it would be to you to have a 64 bit version, I'll do some research to see if it's possible.

Disregard the USPS question - I went ahead and included it in the version just posted, and it appears to pass the USPSTST tests in the EXLIB 908,52 directory

ash-7.0.1761.0-el9-efs-upd.tz
ash70notes.txt

thanks, working thru this, what libashmysql should i be using for the 32 bit ?

I didn't realize you were using MySQL. Worse, I seem to have hit some kind of road block installing the 32 bit libmysqlclient.so for -el9. The MySQL Package Download Page seems to indicate that the x86_64 and i686 versions are bundled together, but the rpm download packages do not appear to contain any 32 bit libraries. I tried using the -el7 version but so far without any success.

What version of the server are you using? And by any chance do you have any /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so files installed with it (for el9)?

i cant find any libmysqlclient.so files anywhere,

[root@prod1test etc]# cat os-release
NAME="AlmaLinux"
VERSION="9.4 (Seafoam Ocelot)"
ID="almalinux"
ID_LIKE="rhel centos fedora"
VERSION_ID="9.4"
PLATFORM_ID="platform:el9"
PRETTY_NAME="AlmaLinux 9.4 (Seafoam Ocelot)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;34"
LOGO="fedora-logo-icon"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:almalinux:almalinux:9::baseos"
HOME_URL="https://almalinux.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://wiki.almalinux.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.almalinux.org/"

ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT="AlmaLinux-9"
ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="9.4"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="AlmaLinux"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="9.4"
SUPPORT_END=2032-06-01
[root@prod1test etc]# [root@prod1test etc]# cat os-release
NAME="AlmaLinux"
VERSION="9.4 (Seafoam Ocelot)"
ID="almalinux"
ID_LIKE="rhel centos fedora"
VERSION_ID="9.4"
PLATFORM_ID="platform:el9"
PRETTY_NAME="AlmaLinux 9.4 (Seafoam Ocelot)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;34"
LOGO="fedora-logo-icon"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:almalinux:almalinux:9::baseos"
HOME_URL="https://almalinux.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://wiki.almalinux.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.almalinux.org/"

ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT="AlmaLinux-9"
ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="9.4"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="AlmaLinux"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="9.4"
SUPPORT_END=2032-06-01

You would have to try to install it, but there seem to be many different sources / repos, and it's not yet clear to me which, or if any, contains the 32 bit libmysqlclient.so.

I did however land on this topic which appears to suggest that it can be installed from the mariadb-connector-c-devel.i686 package ...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/758535/how-to-install-libmysqlclient-dev-at-almalinux-9-2

I can't investigate it right now but may try that later.

success, now onwards to see what else i will need

I've relocated this discuss to a new MySQL / EL9 thread to make it easier to locate later.