Saltproject IO

FAQs from Salt Project Repo Migration and Open Hour

by Salt Project Team — Nov 22, 2024

This is a continuation of several blog post announcements related to infrastructure migration:

Salt Project Community Members!

There have been a lot of changes with Salt Project over the past month, due to migrations out of cloud hosting. We’d like to address a lot of questions related to the migrations.

New Salt Repositories

repo.saltproject.io and archive.repo.saltproject.io no longer exist.

The new repositories are hosted on packages.broadcom.com at:

Layout Changes

Major layout changes in our new repositories have greatly simplified our package management.

We were only creating a single set of deb and rpm packages each release, before duplicating the packages across several directory layouts to mirror our supported operating systems. This was because of tech debt, as older packages of Salt required packages specific to each operating system before making use of relenv (onedir). We also had a requirement to greatly reduce the amount of storage used by our packages, as part of this migration, which meant an immediate need to address the layout.

Instead of duplicating these packages, we now provide generic instructions for deb and rpm based package managers to install our packages.

The initial migration did not include a filelists.xml file in the saltproject-rpm repo, which prevented tools such as foreman from creating local mirrors. This has since been resolved via:

Unsupported Versions of Salt Dropped

With these new changes, all versions of Salt prior to Salt v3006 LTS are no longer available. The unsupported packages of Salt were not included in the migration, and will not be added in the future.

NOTE: Salt rpm and deb packages will likely work on unsupported and EOL operating systems (ex. RHEL 7, etc.). This would mean that systems can run updated/patched versions of Salt instead of needing to stay on EOL versions that have security issues. With this being said, the Salt Project Team will not work on any issues opened for unsupported operating systems unless the user has reproduced the bug on a supported operating system.

TurtleTraction Shoutout

Salt Project gives a special thanks to TurtleTraction for helping the Salt Project community by making mirrors of the old repositories publicly available:

NOTE: These repositories are not officially provided by Broadcom or Salt Project. They are provided by TurtleTraction (a third-party). Please handle with care and avoid pointing a large number of Salt Minions to the repositories, as TurtleTraction is hosting these endpoints themselves to assist with this transition period for Salt users.

To learn more about TurtleTraction, along with their news about these mirrors, visit the TurtleTraction website.

AAAA records / IPv6 support

For users of Salt with IPv6-only infrastructure, attempting to download packages from packages.broadcom.com will fail as the endpoint only supports IPv4 at the moment.

The Salt Project Team does not have control over this like we did back when we maintained the AWS infrastructure hosting our packages. We’ve reached out to the Broadcom team that manages this.

The issue is currently being tracked here:

Salt Install Guide overhaul

Several updates and clarifications were made to the Salt Install Guide after migrating it to be hosted on GitHub Pages:

Salt Supported Operating Systems

For the most up-to-date list of supported operating systems by Salt Project, visit Salt Install Guide - Salt supported operating systems.

Some clarifications we’d like to make:

  • MacOS Support: Salt Project will continue to test and built Salt packages on MacOS. These packages will not be signed, for the time being.
  • Amazon Linux 2 / Amazon Linux 2023 Support: Salt Project will continue to test against these operating systems in CI/CD, and consider them to be supported by LTS and STS releases.

salt-bootstrap status

Salt Project YouTube Channel

Until further notice, Salt Project will no longer be uploading videos to the Salt Project YouTube channel. This means that Open Hours and Working Group recordings will not be uploaded, and notes should be taken where possible. We recommend joining the Salt Project Community Discord for discussions and working group updates.

The community will be informed if this changes in the future.

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