Re: [Qemu-devel] Deprecation policy and build dependencies

["Philippe Mathieu-Daudé" <philmd@redhat.com>]

On 6/3/19 8:16 PM, Cornelia Huck wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 14:02:16 -0400
> John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
[...]
>> I would rather not support Python2 a day after the clock expires.
>>
>>> I didn't bother checking Debian, Ubuntu LTS and SLES.
>>>
>>> For hosts other than Linux, we're less ambitious.
>>>   
>>
>> That policy strikes me as weird, because RHEL7 is not going to be, in
>> general, using the latest and greatest QEMU. Usually stable versions of
>> distros stick with the versions of the programs that came out at the time.
> 
> I think the idea was that folks might actually develop on a 'stable'
> distro (in a previous life, I used to complain quite often that
> building QEMU on a stable distro broke... it was one of my main
> development machines, but not controlled by me).
> 
>>
>> What's the benefit of making sure that stable platforms can continue to
>> run the *newest* QEMU? Is this even a reasonable restriction? If you are
>> running RHEL7, how many projects do you expect to be able to git clone
>> and build and have that work with the rest of your legacy/stable
>> dependencies?
>>
>> RHEL7 uses a 1.5.3 based version. I don't think it matters if we update
>> 4.2 to be Python3 only, really.
> 
> It depends on how old the distro is and what update policy it
> uses... if parts of it are regularly updated, it might actually be
> usable. In this case, I think we really need to interpret our policy
> to include EPEL, or it is completely nuts.

Red Hat supports Docker on RHEL 7 and above.

Docker solved all my problems, as long as a host can install Docker, I
can build on old or edge images. I don't install plenty of dependencies
on my testing hosts, but in trashable docker images. For regular testing
I use image snapshots.

You need a sysadmin (or root access) to install the docker daemon however.