On Sun, 10 Sept 2023 at 22:01, Michael Tokarev <m...@tls.msk.ru> wrote: > > Hi! > > For quite some time I'm collecting stuff for stable, pocking various > people with questions about stable, etc, so has become somewhat more > visible and somewhat annoying too :) Especially when I publish the > next stable patch round-up, which has not only become larger when > counting individual patches, but also multiplied by now 3 stable > series. So I guess you wondered what's going on, what's the buzz > is all about, and when this ever stop... :) > > Seriously though, I stepped up to maintain -stable series just out of > nowhere, just because I had issues with qemu in debian and thought to > do something with that, but instead of collecting stuff privately > inside debian, I decided to give it a more visible try, to see how > it will work out, without understanding how it will be.
Thanks very much for taking on this work -- it's been an area where for some time the project has lagged behind because we didn't have anybody who could dedicate the time to doing stable releases on a regular basis. So it's been great to see the stable backport branches being more active. > Meanwhile, next debian stable has been released, codenamed Bookworm, > which has qemu version 7.2. And it should be supported for the next > 2 years until next debian release. > > We never had any long-maintained releases in QEMU before, usually the > previous series maintenance stopped once next major release is out. > Right now there's stable-7.2 and stable-8.0 still in existance even > after 8.1 has been released. I should draw the line somewhere, even > while so far, the whole stuff has been quite easy (but time-consuming). > > For now I decided I'll stop publishing stable-8.0 releases. This one > had a number of linux-user issues, a big share of which Richard fixed > at the very end of 8.1 development cycle. There will be one more 8.0 > stable release at least (see below for the details), together with the > first 8.1 stable. > > I think this is more appropriate to drop support for previous stable > not with next major, but with first major stable release instead, - > this way users have much more choices for smooth upgrade to the next > major version. So stable-8.0 will end with 8.1.1. Unless there's > a good reason to continue. That seems reasonable. I think ultimately what we do in stable releases depends on what people care enough about to want to do the backport-and-release work for, though :-) thanks -- PMM
