Our distro support policy has been written with a best-effort estimation of what users and developers need. However, as we now know, the support for older long-term distributions can get really troublesome for upstream development, since it is for example close to impossible to keep the code for all Python versions maintained, especially if upstream projects dropped support a longer time ago already (Python 3.6 has been EOL at the end of 2021) while it is still the main version of some long-term distros (CentOS/RHEL 8 and openSUSE/SLES 15). The QEMU project only has a limited amount of people working on the development, so we just cannot afford of supporting both, very old and the latest versions of our dependencies without burning the few people who are working on those topics. So we *have* to refine our support statement instead:
1) Once a new major version has been released, it should be enough to limit the support for the previous major versions to one year instead of two. One year should be enough time to get all people who are interested in following the development of QEMU and who would like to use the latest and greatest version of QEMU to upgrade their system to the next major release of their distribution. All others are likely happy with the old version of QEMU that is provided by their distributor anyway and thus likely won't try to compile the latest and greatest version of QEMU on their system. 2) For long-term distributions that release a new version only very seldom, we limit the support to four years after the initial release. Note: These changes mean that openSUSE is not considered as supported anymore (since version 15.0 has been released in May 2018), and RHEL/CentOS 8 will not be supported anymore in 3 months (since version 8.0 has been released in May 2019). Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> --- docs/about/build-platforms.rst | 9 +++++---- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/about/build-platforms.rst b/docs/about/build-platforms.rst index 1c1e7b9e11..cdc38f16a4 100644 --- a/docs/about/build-platforms.rst +++ b/docs/about/build-platforms.rst @@ -67,10 +67,11 @@ Non-supported architectures may be removed in the future following the Linux OS, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD ----------------------------------------- -The project aims to support the most recent major version at all times. Support -for the previous major version will be dropped 2 years after the new major -version is released or when the vendor itself drops support, whichever comes -first. In this context, third-party efforts to extend the lifetime of a distro +The project aims to support the most recent major version at all times for +up to four years after its initial release. Support for the previous major +version will be dropped one years after the new major version is released +or when the vendor itself drops support, whichever comes first. +In this context, third-party efforts to extend the lifetime of a distro are not considered, even when they are endorsed by the vendor (eg. Debian LTS); the same is true of repositories that contain packages backported from later releases (e.g. Debian backports). Within each major release, only the most -- 2.31.1
