> On Aug 18, 2021, at 12:16 PM, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki > <marma...@invisiblethingslab.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 12:37:27PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: >> The current policy for minimum supported versions of tools, compilers, >> etc. is unsatisfactory: For many dependencies no minimum version is >> specified. For those where a version is stated, updating it is a >> decision that has to be explicitly taken for that tool. >> >> The result is persistent debates over what is good to support, >> conducted in detail in the context of individual patches. >> >> Decisions about support involve tradeoffs, often tradeoffs between the >> interests of different people. Currently we don't have anything >> resembling a guideline. The result is that the individual debates are >> inconclusive; and also, this framework does not lead to good feelings >> amongst participants. >> >> I suggest instead that we adopt a date-based policy: we define a >> maximum *age* of dependencies that we will support. > > I wonder about another approach: specify supported toolchain version(s) > based on environments we choose to care about. That would be things like > "Debian, including LTS (or even ELTS) one", "RHEL/CentOS until X...", > etc. Based on this, it's easy to derive what's the oldest version that > needs to be supported. > This would be also much friendlier for testing - a clear definition > what environments should be used (in gitlab-ci, I guess).
This is in fact what I’ve been thinking and talking about proposing for a very long time. As far as an open-source offering, what we really want is for the newest version of Xen to build on all currently-supported distros. If the distro maintainers themselves no longer want to support a distro, I don’t see why we should make the effort to do so. As you say, this should make testing super easy as well: All we have to do is have docker images on gitlab for all the supported distros. -George
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