Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] How to handle feature regressions in new QEMU releases

[ronnie sahlberg <ronniesahlberg@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 10:11 AM, Stefan Weil <sw@weilnetz.de> wrote:
> Am 16.07.2014 18:49, schrieb Paolo Bonzini:
>> Il 16/07/2014 18:28, Stefan Weil ha scritto:
>>> Debian testing includes a brand new libiscsi, but it
>>> does not include libiscsi.pc, so pkg-config won't know that it is
>>> available and configure will disable libiscsi.
>>
>> That's a packaging bug.
>
> CC'ing Michael as he is the Debian maintainer of this package and
> Aurélien who maintains QEMU for Debian.
>
> Michael, should I send a Debian bug report for libiscsi-dev? Would an
> update of libiscsi for Debian stable be reasonable if versions older
> than 1.9 are too buggy to be used?

If you ask debian to upgrade. Could you ask them to wait and upgrade after I
have release the next version, hopefully if all goes well, at the end
of this week?

It contains new functionality, thanks to plieven, to better handle
cases where active/passive storage arrays
perform failover.


> I must admit that I'm a little bit
> surprised because iSCSI support worked for me quite well the last time I
> used it with Debian wheezy.

I think, and plieven please correct me if I am wrong, earlier version
would work reasonably well for basic use
but there were bugs and gaps in functionality that made it ill suited
for enterprise environments.

>
> Regards
> Stefan
>
>>
>>> I have a patch which
>>> fixes this, so QEMU for Debian testing could include libiscsi again.
>>>
>>> Is a feature regression like this one acceptable? Do we need additional
>>> testing (maybe run the build bots with --enable-xxx, so builds fail when
>>> xxx no longer works)?
>>
>> As mentioned in the e49ab19fcaa617ad6cdfe1ac401327326b6a2552 commit
>> message, this was intentional.  I was reluctant to do it, but ultimately
>> Peter Lieven convinced me that it isn't just about using fancy new APIs;
>> libiscsi was too buggy to be useful until release 1.8.0 (even 1.9.0
>> requires a patch to avoid segfaults, and many more if you want to run it
>> on ARM).
>>
>> Paolo
>
>