Moving to CentOS 7 and CentOS 6 End-of-Life

conda-forge's compiler stack uses repackaged libraries from CentOS 6 to supply certain libraries, notably glibc when building recipes. We currently default to using CentOS 6 with the glibc 2.12 ABI. However, CentOS 6 reached end-of-life in November 2020 and increasingly software packages require at least CentOS 7 with the glibc 2.17 ABI. We also realize that due to recent events, some communities that may have been planning to skip CentOS 7 and move straight to CentOS 8 might be reconsidering those plans. Further, they may not be ready for a full-scale switch to CentOS 7. Thus the conda-forge core team has decided to delay moving to CentOS 7 until sometime early next year, likely the end of January 2021 at the earliest. We are actively looking for feedback from our users on this issue. Please do get in touch if you have comments or concerns!