[PATCH 08/17] qemu: Formally deprecate support for qemu < 3.1

[Peter Krempa]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 08:35:55 -0700, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 10:35:25AM +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> > As of April 23 2022, Ubuntu 20.04 will be out for two years, which means
> > we no longer have to support Ubuntu 18.04 along with qemu-2.11 shipped
> > with it.
> >
> > This then brings the minimum qemu version we have to support to
> > qemu-3.1:
> >
> >    Debian 10/Stable: 3.1
> >  OpenSUSE Leap 15.3: 5.2
> >        Ubuntu 20.04: 4.2
> >     RHEL/Centos 8.4: 4.2
> >
> > Next event in this space will be 2023/07/06 when Debian 11 will be out
> > for two years.
> 
> It's actually much earlier than that :)
> 
> Quoting our platform support policy[1]:
> 
>   The project aims to support the most recent major version at all
>   times. Support for the previous major version will be dropped 2
>   years after the new major version is released or when the vendor
>   itself drops support, whichever comes first. In this context,
>   third-party efforts to extend the lifetime of a distro are not
>   considered, even when they are endorsed by the vendor (e.g. Debian
>   LTS); the same is true of repositories that contain packages
>   backported from later releases (e.g. Debian backports).
> 
> Looking at the Debian wiki[2] we can see
> 
>   Version   Code name   Release date   End of life date
>        10      Buster     2019-07-06           ~2022-08
> 
> which is consistent with what's written a few lines down
> 
>   Reminder: the EOL date for the stable release is the date of the
>   next stable release plus one year.

Oh, I didn't notice that and somehow assumed that we'd have to apply our
policy of 2 years.

> So come August we'll be able to bump the minimum QEMU version
> further, all the way to 4.2 :)

That is awesome news. I'm really looking forward to delete all
pre-blockdev disk code!!