RFC: deprecating/obsoleting netcf package and libvirt virInterface*() APIs

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 02:47:53PM -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
> 1) Does this generally sound like a good direction? Or is there something
> I'm ignoring that renders my points moot?
> 
> 2) If we are going to do it, how should we proceed?
> 
> We obviously can't simply *remove* the virInterface API from libvirt (since
> that would destroy backward compatibility guarantees), but could immediately
> begin logging some sort of "this API is deprecated" message when any of the
> functions are called, and then in a later release change the APIs to return
> an error (while simultaneously removing netcf from the build and dependency
> lists). At the same time, we would need to decide if the "interface status"
> functionality needs to be maintained within appropriate virInterface*()
> APIs, reproduced in virNodeDeviceGetXMLDesc(), or just dropped altogether.

We should *NOT* deprecate the public APIs. The design of them is perfectly
valid and can accept any other implementation in future.

A more viable impl of network APIs could be to back them by Networkmanager,
or systemd network, or whatever is relevant to a particular platform

If we want to drop netcf because the project is unmaintained that is fine,
the APIs simply return an VIR_ERR_NO_SUPPORT code as with any other API
that has no impl in a particular hypervisor.

Regards,
Daniel
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