[libvirt] Dropping RHEL-6/CentOS-6 support

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 04:19:48PM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-02-09 at 14:18 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > > The above is to point out that users of Centos 6 usually won't compile
> > > libvirt and qemu from sources since they want to enjoy benefits of a
> > > stable platform with tested software. Sticking upstream versions on top
> > > of that defies the purpose.
> > 
> > NB, RHEL is not the only distro we target - when I say we should target
> > RHEL-6 as the oldest platform, I use that mostly as an example of the
> > approximate vintage. I would consider any still supported Debian version
> > that is the same age as RHEL-6 to be a valid platform too, likeise for
> > Ubuntu LTS releases or SLES. At least some of those will using fairly
> > vanilla QEMU version without feature backports.
> 
> Do you mean SLES 11, RHEL 6 or Ubuntu 12.04 are likely to get the
> latest upstream libvirt release as a vendor update?

I'm not saying the vendors are going to rebase, just that we aim to
enable that should they wish to. They are valid targets we aim to
build for, regardless of what the OS vendors chooses todo. Users or
other downstream vendors have the option to build newer libvirt / QEMU
as they wish.

> I tend to agree with Peter when he says that people stick with older
> versions of software because they have a working setup and don't want
> to risk it breaking, and replacing vendor-provided system components
> with manually compiled upstream releases kinda goes in the opposite
> direction :) I would definitely never have risked anything like that
> in my previous life as a system administrator.

For OpenStack, users are indeed updating core bits of the base OS to
newer versions. It is also not neccessarily the users who are supplying
the newer versions. For example, a vendor supplying software that extends
RHEL, may choose to replace some bits of the core OS & support them.
For example, Red Hat actually do this with their OpenStack product, where
we have shipped newer versions of qemu + libvirt than were actually
present in the base RHEL we deplkoyed openstack on. I know other OpenStack
vendors do similarly, particularly with Ubuntu LTS releases there is an
add-on cloud-archive repository providing newer versions of libvirt and
QEMU.

Regards,
Daniel
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