There are a few aspects of supporting a distribution:
* Packaging of all of the core components of OpenStack, which means
keeping dependencies up to date, dealing with rebases from the stable
branch releases, backporting critical fixes from the stable branch
* Maintaining, monitoring and troubleshooting CI jobs
* Test day work, making sure that the distro works smoothly
* Bug triage for things specific to the platform (i.e. a bug on CentOS6
that is not present on CentOS7)
* Deal with differences in base components like kernel, libvirt, qemu-kvm
With RHEL6 it is becoming increasingly impossible to get required
features into above components to support OpenStack, we already went
through to hoops until Icehouse.
Solution could be to replace all those with upstream rebuilds
(kernel-ml, virt-preview for EL) but what's then left from the base OS
and how supportable would be that combination?
Cheers,
Alan