Ops 3.0 will drop Ubuntu 20.04 support

Announcement: Ops 3.0 will drop Ubuntu 20.04 support. We plan to release Ops 3.0 at the end of June 2025, dropping support for Python 3.8 and Ubuntu 20.04 – a breaking change.

  • There’ll be no API changes from the last 2.x release available at that time
  • It will drop support for Python 3.8 and require 3.10
  • This means Ops 3.0 will drop support for an Ubuntu 20.04 base and require 22.04
  • We’ll provide critical bug and security fixes for Ops 2.x for at least 12 months (Ubuntu 20.04 reaches end of standard support in May 2025)

The reason for this change is that Python 3.8 went end-of-life in Oct 2024. Many tools and libraries are dropping support, so it’s getting harder to maintain Ops. And we have to do it at some point; remember that we dropped Python 3.5 support with Ops 2.0.0 in Jan 2023.

If your charm can drop 20.04 support, please do that. If you can’t drop 20.04 support, you have two options:

  1. Stick with the last Ops 2.x release if you don’t need new Ops features, or
  2. Maintain a 20.04 branch of your charm

Please let me know if you have any questions.

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As far as I know, the following juju issue is blocking k8s charms to be simply refreshed after a base change. So this deprecation could force some redeployments.

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