[libvirt] Time to drop support for Debian 8 (Jessie)?

[Andrea Bolognani]

We currently support Debian 8 (oldstable) along with Debian 9
(stable), but not without some compromises:

  * the libvirt-dbus, libvirt-ocaml and virt-manager projects do not
    support the platform at all because it ships outdated versions of
    some core components;

  * on the CI side of things, we are forced to drag in the JRE from
    backports in order to be able to run the Jenkins agent.

All things considered, the situation has been fairly manageable up
until now, but a couple of recent developments got me thinking that
perhaps it's time to let Jessie go:

  * the distribution has been moved from the regular Debian
    infrastructure to archive.debian.org[1], a change which has
    resulted in the daily update run failing and would require
    investing time to adapt to;

  * Debian testing has recently entered the full freeze[2], which
    means the release of Debian 10 can hopefully be expected to
    happen within the next few month;

  * even if the Buster freeze period turned out to be exceedingly
    long, according to our platform support policy[3] we only
    promise to support a release for the two years after the most
    recent major release: given that Debian 9 was released in June
    2017[4], we would be able to drop Debian 8 support in three
    months' time regardless of whether or not Debian 10 has been
    released in the meantime.

Based on the above, I suggest we don't invest any time trying to keep
Debian 8 chugging along only to drop it in June, and instead declare
it as unsupported right now and move on with our lives.

Thoughts?


[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00006.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00003.html
[3] https://libvirt.org/platforms.html
[4] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization