Re: [Qemu-devel] [qemu-web PATCH] Add a blog post about deprecation of old interfaces and features

[Thomas Huth]

On 25.07.2017 13:15, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 01:10:38PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> On 25/07/2017 13:07, Thomas Huth wrote:
>>> The list of deprecated interfaces/features in the wiki should be pretty
>>> complete now, so it is now time to draw some more public attention to our
>>> plans of removing certain interfaces/features in future releases.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <address@hidden>
>>> ---
>>>  _posts/2017-07-25-deprecation.md | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>>  1 file changed, 26 insertions(+)
>>>  create mode 100644 _posts/2017-07-25-deprecation.md
>>>
>>> diff --git a/_posts/2017-07-25-deprecation.md 
>>> b/_posts/2017-07-25-deprecation.md
>>> new file mode 100644
>>> index 0000000..b5eaf0b
>>> --- /dev/null
>>> +++ b/_posts/2017-07-25-deprecation.md
>>> @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
>>> +---
>>> +layout: post
>>> +title:  "Deprecation of old parameters and features"
>>> +date:   2017-07-25 9:00:00 +0200
>>> +author: Thomas Huth
>>> +categories: [features, 'web site']
>>
>> Maybe s/web site/wiki/?
>>
>>> +---
>>> +QEMU has a lot of interfaces (like command line options or HMP commands) 
>>> and
>>> +old features (like certain devices) which are considered as deprecated
>>> +since other more generic or better interfaces/features have been 
>>> established
>>> +instead. While the QEMU developers are generally trying to keep each QEMU
>>> +release compatible with the previous ones, the old legacy sometimes gets 
>>> into
>>> +the way when developing new code and/or causes quite some burden of 
>>> maintaining
>>> +it.
>>> +
>>> +Thus we are currently considering to get rid of some of the old interfaces
>>> +and features in a future release and have started to collect a list of such
>>> +old items in our Wiki on a
>>> +[page about removing legacy 
>>> parts](http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/LegacyRemoval).
>>> +If you are running QEMU directly, please have a look at this page to see
>>> +whether you are still using one of these old interfaces or features, so you
>>> +can adapt your setup to use the new interfaces or features instead. Or if
>>> +you rather think that one of the legacy interfaces/features should *not* be
>>> +removed from QEMU at all, please speak up on the
>>> +[qemu-devel mailing list](http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/MailingLists)
>>> +to explain why the interface or feature is still required.
>>
>> This text looks good.
>>
>> However, we should first finalize Daniel's patches and update the wiki
>> to match the newly-instated policy.  The blog post might also include
>> the text that is added to the manual.
> 
> IMHO we shouldn't really point people to the wiki at all. The qemu-doc
> content is what any 3rd parties should rely, since that has been formally
> reviewed & approved by maintainers.
> 
> The remaining content on the wiki page that differs from qemu-doc, is a
> braindump of stuff that could potentially be removed, but is not at all
> certain that any will be deprecated. IOW the wiki page is fine for QEMU
> maintainers to use, but 3rd parties should only use the published docs.

Ok, your points about the wiki are certainly true ... but so far we
still haven't decided on a final wording for qemu-doc yet ... or do we
have an agreement on the machine type deprecation already? Maybe it's
really best if you omit the part about machine type deprecation there
for now, and discuss that again in the 2.11 time frame, so that we at
least get the other parts still into the qemu-doc for 2.10 ?

 Thomas