Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] CI: Stop building docs on centos8

[Thomas Huth]

On 14/02/2023 08.40, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > We don't have to drop python 3.6. It is a choice because
> > of a desire to be able to use some shiny new python
> > features without caring about back compat.
>
> I read this on Friday, and decided to let it sit until after the
> weekend.  Well, it's now Tuesday, and to be frank, it's still as
> offensively flippant as it was on Friday.  It shows either ignorance of
> or cavalier disregard for the sheer amount of work some of us have had
> to put into keeping old versions of Python viable.

I'm a complete python ignorant, too, so I'm a little bit surprised of the 
amount of pain that these scripts are causing.

No matter of that fact, I think Peter still has a point that we have a real 
conflict here with our current support policy. So this either means that 
Python was the wrong choice for our needs (since it is moving too fast and 
causing too much friction), or we should really rethink our support policy.

I guess we're too deep into the Python rabbit hole already, and I'm not 
aware of any other good solutions (back to Perl scripts? No, thanks!), so 
it's likely quite impossible to tune that knob.

Thus we should maybe really start talking about our support policy now. I 
think the main problem is likely the sentence "Support for the previous 
major version will be dropped 2 years after the new major version is 
released". Maybe we should shorten that time frame to 1 year. The 2 years 
caused some confusions in the past already, since e.g. Debian only supports 
the previous major release for only one more year, and macOS also releases a 
major version each year ... so IMHO we could shorten the time frame for the 
previous major release to 1 year instead. People then could still continue 
building QEMU on CentOS 8, but they have to be aware that they might install 
other software like Sphinx manually if they want to continue using QEMU with 
docs there. What do you think?

 Thomas