Automating Linux Distribution Updates in Continuous Integration

For a long time, we had a recurring TODO in our calendar: once a month, check whether any Linux distro we test against got a new stable version—or dropped support for an old one.

In reality, it was annoying, error-prone, and we were always late. Someone had to remember, look up release notes, update our CI matrix, and push a commit.

It was busywork, not engineering.

So we automated it.

We found endoflife.date has a neat API with lifecycle information for many distributions.