Re: [PATCH v2 1/5] libxl: Generate golang bindings in libxl Makefile

[Nick Rosbrook <rosbrookn@xxxxxxxxx>]

> > Out of curiosity, would it be totally out of the question to require
> > having gofmt installed (not for 4.14, but in the future)? I ask because
> > I haven't seen it discussed one way or the other.
> 
> I think I’d like to try to avoid it, unless / until we have a “core 
> component” written in golang.  For one, if we added it as a core dependency, 
> we’d need to be  backwards compatible to the oldest version of golang of 
> distros on which we want to build; that would include  Debian oldstable, 
> Ubuntu LTS, probably CentOS 7 at least, possibly CentOS 6, and so on.  If any 
> of those didn’t have golang available, then we’d basically have to decide 
> between dropping support for those distros, and making golang optional.
> 
> I don’t at the moment have a good feel for what other people in the community 
> feel about this, but generally speaking being fanatically backwards 
> compatible is an investment in the long-term ecosystem; keeping Xen *as a 
> whole* building on older distros is an example of that.  (FWIW I don’t think 
> we have an official rubric, but my starting point is that we should try to 
> build on all still-supported major distros; that would include CentOS 6 until 
> Q4 of 2020, if my quick Google search is correct.)
> 
> One advantage of making golang optional is that we don’t have to be quite so 
> backwards compatible — up until we declare the feature “fully supported”, we 
> can move the minimum required version forward at will if we want to rely on 
> new features.

That all makes sense, thanks for explaining.

-NR