CentOS 9 will be still supported FWICT, the original mail talks about CentOS Stream 8
Let's remember that good ol' plain CentOS 8 still exists and likely has more users than Stream FWIW.
which was released about 4 years ago and goes EOL on May 31, 2024, which is not long after Ceph S will be even released as stable the first time, possibly even before that if S gets a bit delayed like reef did..
I have no skin in the Ceph on CentOS game, but IMO it doesn't seem aggressive to stop support for a distribution in a release if the distribution is going EOL around the time of when said release is actually done.
I hadn't accounted for that offset in my prior reply. If Squid releases most of a year from now (has the cadence relative to Reef actual vs target been decided?) then I grudgingly concede that's long enough. OS sunsetting is more problematic when the dropped release is such that one can't feasibly update it in-situ, but one can update from Rocky/CentOS 8 ->9 without reimaging and without a change of init system.
No, S is just the next letter after R (for Reef) in the Alphabet, and means the next major release (i.e. 19.2) planned for 2024. S is used as short form of the actual codename, not sure if already definitive but it seems "Squid" was the most popular: https://pad.ceph.com/p/s
Squid for S was kind of inevitable.