Re: Debian support lifetime (was Re: [PATCH] docker: move tests from python2 to python3)

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 at 12:58, Daniel P. Berrangé <address@hidden> wrote:
> When first wording the lifetimes, I tried to strike a balance between
> limiting what we have to support, while also not negatively impacting
> a large number of QEMU developers or users. Since we had never had
> such support lifetimes declared for QEMU before, I was fairly generous,
> hence picking the 2 year overlap for LTS distros (Ubuntu, RHEL and
> SLES).
>
> It is easier to come to a decision when considering a real world tech
> problem related to the lifetime.
>
> The start of this thread was debating Debian / Python support. If we
> fix the doc to put debian under the short life distro category, we'll
> have solved the Python problem IIUC.

I don't think Debian counts as a distro "with frequent, short-lifetime
releases", though.

Stating overall that we don't intend to support distro versions
that the distro themselves doesn't support ought to be sufficient,
shouldn't it?

In general, my view is that if we bump up against any of these
support-lifetime limits then we're being too eager to drop
support for something from QEMU and we should prefer to retain
support for a while longer. I like and think that it's important
that QEMU as a project does not live on the bleeding-edge and
require latest-and-greatest versions of its dependencies to build.

thanks
-- PMM