[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] fix qemu building with older make



On 07/29/2014 05:13 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 29.07.14 at 17:43, <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jan Beulich writes ("Re: [PATCH] fix qemu building with older make"):
On 29.07.14 at 15:57, <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
(b) have some kind of
time limit on how long we need to support make 3.80 ?

3.81 was released upstream over eight years ago in April 2006.

I know, but I also know there's going to be a few more years where
for my day-to-day work SLE10 (coming with make 3.80) is the lowest
common denominator in order to be able to test backports there.
And RHEL5, iirc released at about the same time, was also quite
recently considered a platform desirable to continue to support.

RHEL5 was released in March 2007, 11 months after make 3.81 was
released upstream.  Furthermore it is seven years old.  SLES10 was
released in June 2006, and is therefore eight years old.  People refer
to Debian stable as `Debian stale' but frankly this is ridiculous.

At the very least can we put some kind of bound on this ?

How about we `compromise' on the following rule: we will feel
completely entitled to delete any build and tools compatibility code
for anything which was superseded upstream more than a decade ago.

I'm personally not in favor of this, but if a reasonably large majority
would want a rule like this, I'll have to try and live with it. My scope
for deprecation would be more towards such relatively wide spread
distros going completely out of service (i.e. in the case of SLES not
just general support [which happened about a year ago], but also
long-term/extended support [which I think is scheduled for like 12
or 13 years after general availability]).

FWIW, one of the things that has made Docker possible is Linus' quixotic commitment to binary compatibility for any user-space program, whether in a distro or not.

RHEL apparently has several lifecycle "phases" (https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/); "Production 2" for RHEL 5 just ended in January of this year; "Production 3" won't end until 2017, and the "Extended Life Phase" won't end until 2020.

Staying compatible with major distros, particularly if it's something small (if slightly ugly) like this, seems like a small price to pay.

 -George

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel


 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.