Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] configure: Drop AIX host support

[Markus Armbruster]

Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:

> On 4 September 2017 at 19:09, Thomas Huth <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 04.09.2017 19:19, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> Nobody has mentioned AIX host support on the mailing list for years,
>>> and we have no test systems for it so it is most likely broken.
>>> We've advertised in configure for two releases now that we plan
>>> to drop support for this host OS, and have had no complaints.
>>
>> We just added this some weeks ago to our qemu-doc.texi:
>>
>> "Prior to the 2.10.0 release there was no official policy on how long
>> features would be deprecated prior to their removal, nor any documented
>> list of which features were deprecated. Thus any features deprecated
>> prior to 2.10.0 will be treated as if they were first deprecated in the
>> 2.10.0 release."

Daniel's commit eb22aeca65f.

> We pretty clearly say in the configure message
>     echo "The QEMU project intends to remove support for this host OS in"
>     echo "a future release if nobody volunteers to maintain it and to"
>     echo "provide a build host for our continuous integration setup."
>
> and my intention when I wrote that was absolutely to dump old
> OSes in a couple of releases... The amount of code removed here
> isn't great so I guess waiting a little longer doesn't hurt,
> but I feel like somebody's moved the goalposts in adding that
> language and not listing the deprecated host OSes and CPUs
> in the list of deprecated features in 2.10 :-(

AIX host has been *clearly* deprecated since 2.9.0 (commit 898be3e).
Failure to include that in a summary added later and elsewhere does not
undo that.  It's simply a bug in the summary.  We can discuss whether a
grace period of two releases is enough.  For what it's worth, I think it
is in this case.

Let's fix the bugs in the summary for 2.10.1.