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

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Thu, 2019-03-28 at 10:59 +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 02:36:37PM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > 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     support the platform at all because it ships outdated versions of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;
> 
> I'm a little confused why we saw any failures. The email link says
> that the LTS architectures were not moving to archive.debian.org
> x86_64 is an LTS arch so wouldn't have moved unless I'm misreading
> the mail.

  $ ./lcitool update libvirt-debian-8 libvirt
  ...
  TASK [Update installed packages] **********************************
  fatal: [libvirt-debian-8]: FAILED! => {"changed": false,
    "msg": "Failed to update apt cache: W:Failed to fetch
    http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/jessie-backports/main/binary-amd64/Packages
    404  Not Found [IP: 151.101.248.204 80]\n, E:Some index files
    failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used
    instead."}

As mentioned above, we rely on backports for the JRE, so while
we could simply disable the jessie-backport repository that would
leave us with some packages that are installed on the system but
can't be updated, a situation that I would not be particularly
comfortable with.

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization