Re: QEMU Stable series

[Peter Maydell]

On Sun, 10 Sept 2023 at 22:01, Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> For quite some time I'm collecting stuff for stable, pocking various
> people with questions about stable, etc, so has become somewhat more
> visible and somewhat annoying too :)  Especially when I publish the
> next stable patch round-up, which has not only become larger when
> counting individual patches, but also multiplied by now 3 stable
> series.  So I guess you wondered what's going on, what's the buzz
> is all about, and when this ever stop... :)
>
> Seriously though, I stepped up to maintain -stable series just out of
> nowhere, just because I had issues with qemu in debian and thought to
> do something with that, but instead of collecting stuff privately
> inside debian, I decided to give it a more visible try, to see how
> it will work out, without understanding how it will be.

Thanks very much for taking on this work -- it's been an
area where for some time the project has lagged behind because
we didn't have anybody who could dedicate the time to doing
stable releases on a regular basis. So it's been great to
see the stable backport branches being more active.

> Meanwhile, next debian stable has been released, codenamed Bookworm,
> which has qemu version 7.2.  And it should be supported for the next
> 2 years until next debian release.
>
> We never had any long-maintained releases in QEMU before, usually the
> previous series maintenance stopped once next major release is out.
> Right now there's stable-7.2 and stable-8.0 still in existance even
> after 8.1 has been released.  I should draw the line somewhere, even
> while so far, the whole stuff has been quite easy (but time-consuming).
>
> For now I decided I'll stop publishing stable-8.0 releases.  This one
> had a number of linux-user issues, a big share of which Richard fixed
> at the very end of 8.1 development cycle.  There will be one more 8.0
> stable release at least (see below for the details), together with the
> first 8.1 stable.
>
> I think this is more appropriate to drop support for previous stable
> not with next major, but with first major stable release instead, -
> this way users have much more choices for smooth upgrade to the next
> major version.  So stable-8.0 will end with 8.1.1.  Unless there's
> a good reason to continue.

That seems reasonable. I think ultimately what we do in stable
releases depends on what people care enough about to want to
do the backport-and-release work for, though :-)

thanks
-- PMM