From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:43944) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1d8Tg8-0002KN-Rk for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 10 May 2017 11:37:29 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1d8Tg6-0005BK-9L for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 10 May 2017 11:37:28 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:50820) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1d8Tg6-00059r-3G for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 10 May 2017 11:37:26 -0400 From: Markus Armbruster References: <1494398933-8366-1-git-send-email-thuth@redhat.com> <20170510090841.GF31558@redhat.com> Date: Wed, 10 May 2017 17:37:11 +0200 In-Reply-To: (Thomas Huth's message of "Wed, 10 May 2017 12:05:16 +0200") Message-ID: <87tw4su3iw.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] hw/i386: Deprecate the machines pc-0.10 to pc-0.15 List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Thomas Huth Cc: "Daniel P. Berrange" , Eduardo Habkost , "Michael S. Tsirkin" , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kraxel@redhat.com, Paolo Bonzini , Richard Henderson Thomas Huth writes: > On 10.05.2017 11:08, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: >> On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 08:48:53AM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote: [...] >> Also unless we're going to get more serious about automated testing to >> validate machine type compatibility between *all* previously releases, >> I think that 6 years / 18 releases is too long a time to have any >> confidence in migration compatibility between versions. Seconded. > Distro vendors often offer 5 - 10 years support for certain versions of > their Linux distros, so I think we should at least support 5 years, too. Non sequitur. Distro vendors put in serious work to keep versions working for 5 - 10 years. We can't, and we don't. All we do is try not to break things, which is nice, and helps the distro vendors some, but a far cry from anything I'd dare call "support". Perhaps an argument could be made that us keeping to try for at least 5 years would help distro vendors enough to be worthwhile. Maybe, but color me skeptic. >> IOW, I think you should be more aggressive in culling old machine types >> that this patch is... > > Actually, I like the idea of using the major release versions for > defining the set of removal - hoping that we will do a v3.0 next year > which then would support the previous two major release versions 1.x and > 2.x, but drops support for the 0.xx versions completely ... I wouldn't put *that* much weight into our past version numbers. If I remember correctly, there was no more to 1.0 than a feeling of "this 0.x thing is getting ridiculous".