So I had a read back through the thread, and drew a few conclusions. The
history seems to be:

* The thread was opened ~10 weeks ago, and went quiet ~6 weeks ago
* At that time, there were 5 upvotes (Dominic, Daniel, Ewoud, Michael,
Duncan), 1 downvote (BK), and 1 unsure (Ohad, who said he had "mixed
feelings). Others commented but did not express a preference.
* We then jump forward to a few days ago, with all the discussion that's
happened since.

It's hard to deny that it looked OK to go ahead with, as of 3 days ago;
5-to-1 is something we wouldn't normally challenge, and 6 weeks is plenty
of time to speak up about concerns.

However, I do take issue with comparing it to the previous OS deprecations,
which by-and-large have been Debian/Ubuntu deprecations. These (a) don't
impact as large a part of the community, (b) have a shorter shelf-life than
EL (implying users are more comfortable with upgrading), and (c) have a
simpler packaging structure. They're also unlikely to be using any of the
RPM-centric plugins we offer, which (of course) will be more affected by
dropping EL6 (bear in mind that according to the 2016 survey, some 30% of
our community use Katello - that's not insignificant). As such, while I
agree no fallout occurred in the past, I think we do have to be more
careful this time.

More than anything, I think it's the sudden switch from "dead thread" to
"it's done" that has raised tempers, rather than the decision itself. I
think it would have been reasonable to follow up with a "this seems
decided, I'll do it in a few days" type of email - similar to how the
branching happens. We have a similar "final call" approach in the RFCs, in
case anyone lost sight of the thread in the noise.

In short then, we are where we are. I think these concerns *should* have
been raised earlier, but now that they *have* been raised, I think they're
valid, and we should finish the discussion. As it stands today, we have
around 5-to-4 in favour of dropping EL6 in 1.13, but that's not any kind of
consensus.

Can we get a (re)statement of the pros/cons from each side, to inform the
choices of those on the fence? As of 10th May it seemed that the support of
EL6 was only causing minor issues - is that still true? Other than
preparation time (which is valid) are there other concerns for dropping it?

Cheers
Greg

(PS - More generally, we seem to have an issue with "closing"
discussions/RFCs with a firm decision; many discussions die out in this
way. Thoughts on how we can improve that are welcome, and I will post my
own, but lets start a new thread for that)

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