Upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04

[smolkaj]

GitHub Actions recently upgraded ubuntu-latest from 22.04 to 24.04: actions/runner-images#10636

However, this broke our builds and thus we temporarily pinned to 22.04: #513
This issue tracks making our builds compatible with 24.04 and moving back to ubuntu-latest as a healthy forcing function to prevent bit rot.

cc @chrispsommers @jafingerhut

[smolkaj]

@fruffy @jonathan-dilorenzo have you by any chance dealt with this problem for p4c yet? Any pointers you'd be able to share?

[fruffy]

Do not use ubuntu-latest in the actions, instead specify the version explicitly. This should avoid the problem.

https://github.com/p4lang/p4c/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci-test-debian.yml#L19

[fruffy]

Most Ubuntu 24.04 are related to Python breaking changes. They are quite the pain to deal with.

[smolkaj]

Do not use ubuntu-latest in the actions, instead specify the version explicitly. This should avoid the problem.

https://github.com/p4lang/p4c/blob/main/.github/workflows/ci-test-debian.yml#L19

Yup, that's what we did: #513

However, I actually think NOT pinning versions is a healthy forcing function to prevent bit rot, so I'm hoping to revert to ubuntu-latest once we have gotten things to work with Ubuntu 24.04.

[fruffy]

However, I actually think NOT pinning versions is a healthy forcing function to prevent bit rot, so I'm hoping to revert to ubuntu-latest once we have gotten things to work with Ubuntu 24.04.

In that case you might break older versions though, which can be disruptive. For example, the compiler guarantees to support Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, MacOS Ventura and Sonoma. We even still support Ubuntu 18.04. To start supporting newer versions we eventually just add the action explicitly once the build system is ready. To deprecate a version we create an explicit issue, too.

[smolkaj]

That makes sense, agreed that not breaking older Ubuntu versions seems valuable.

I guess another way to achieve that would be to use pinned versions for older Ubuntu versions we want to support, and additionally ubuntu-latest to prevent bit rot.