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

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 12:23:24PM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> 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     support the platform at all because it ships outdated versions of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.

Ah, so the problem isn't that Jessie has been moved to archive.debian.org,
it is that the jessie-backports repo has been moved / EOLd.

I'm fine with dropping Jessie given that we'll be dropping it in a couple
of months anyway.

We should spin up Buster to replace it too

Regards,
Daniel
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