[DEPR]: Testing explicitly on Ubuntu 20.04

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Proposal Date

2024-09-09

Target Ticket Acceptance Date

2024-09-20

Earliest Open edX Named Release Without This Functionality

Sumac - 2024-09

Rationale

It no longer makes sense to pin testing of the Open edX Platform to a specific version of Ubuntu. As long as the requisite system packages are install and configured, the platform and its components will operate correctly on any modern version of Ubuntu (16.04+).

edx-platform has the most complicated of these requirements but they are documented in it's README. They are also encoded into Tutor the community supported way to run the system.

Operators who are not using Tutor are also operating their own infrastructure orchestration independent of the Open edX system.

Removal / Replacement

To simplify our system now that we are not pinning support to only one version of Ubuntu, we will move all CI testing from using the ubuntu-20.04 github actions image to using the ubuntu-latest github actions image. This change will reduce future maintenance required as newer versions of Ubuntu become available as we expect GitHub to update the logical action work name to point to the new latest image.

Operators Notes

edx-platform

⚠️ Operators Note ⚠️: In newer versions of ubuntu the MD4 hashing algorithm
is disabled by default. To enable it the openssl config needs to be
updated in a manner similar to what's being done here. Alternatively,
you can set the FEATURES['ENABLE_BLAKE2B_HASHING'] setting to True
which will switch to a newer hashing algorithm where MD4 was previously
used.

Because this hashing is being used as a part of the edx-platform caching
mechanism, this will effectively clear the cache for the items that use
this hash. The will impact any items where the cache key might have been
too big to store in memcache so it's hard to predict exactly which items
will be impacted.

Links

• Announcement: https://discuss.openedx.org/t/depr-testing-on-ubuntu-20-04/13887
• This work will be completed as a part of Ubuntu Upgrade platform-roadmap#377

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The relevant changes have all landed and we have moved off of Ubuntu 20.04 to latest for most things and to 24.04 for a few repos where it was relevant to test on specific ubuntu versions.