2026-06-16 –, Opal
Package maintainers for Linux distributions often assume that users keep up with their operating system's support phases. We know that this is not always the case and users are often surprised by end of support events or find themselves accidentally running software past its end of support.
Amazon Linux is AWS homegrown Linux distribution based on Fedora. This session will present how Amazon Linux addresses this visibility gap with the addition of the supportinfo.xml file in its rpm repositories. Supportinfo is a vendor-agnostic file format to document package lifecycle and support levels. It can be used by the package manager (e.g. dnf) and 3rd party applications (e.g. security scanners) to notify users of packages' end-of-support event for installed packages and/or the distributions as a whole.
