Re: Debian support lifetime (was Re: [PATCH] docker: move tests from python2 to python3)

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 01:18:35PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 at 12:58, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > When first wording the lifetimes, I tried to strike a balance between
> > limiting what we have to support, while also not negatively impacting
> > a large number of QEMU developers or users. Since we had never had
> > such support lifetimes declared for QEMU before, I was fairly generous,
> > hence picking the 2 year overlap for LTS distros (Ubuntu, RHEL and
> > SLES).
> >
> > It is easier to come to a decision when considering a real world tech
> > problem related to the lifetime.
> >
> > The start of this thread was debating Debian / Python support. If we
> > fix the doc to put debian under the short life distro category, we'll
> > have solved the Python problem IIUC.
> 
> I don't think Debian counts as a distro "with frequent, short-lifetime
> releases", though.

It is kind of in the middle ground between the short 6 month frequency
releases, and the long 3+ year major releases

> Stating overall that we don't intend to support distro versions
> that the distro themselves doesn't support ought to be sufficient,
> shouldn't it?

Yeah, that at least addresses the python question.

> In general, my view is that if we bump up against any of these
> support-lifetime limits then we're being too eager to drop
> support for something from QEMU and we should prefer to retain
> support for a while longer. I like and think that it's important
> that QEMU as a project does not live on the bleeding-edge and
> require latest-and-greatest versions of its dependencies to build.

Yeah, there's certainly a balance to be hit. If we only rarely have
to debate problems with desired min versions vs distros, and users
rarely complain that we're dropping stuff too soon, then that's a
sign we've got the balance about right.

Regards,
Daniel
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