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

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

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     support the platform at all because it ships outdated versions of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.

> 
>   * Debian testing has recently entered the full freeze[2], which
>     means the release of Debian 10 can hopefully be expected to
>     happen within the next few month;
> 
>   * even if the Buster freeze period turned out to be exceedingly
>     long, according to our platform support policy[3] we only
>     promise to support a release for the two years after the most
>     recent major release: given that Debian 9 was released in June
>     2017[4], we would be able to drop Debian 8 support in three
>     months' time regardless of whether or not Debian 10 has been
>     released in the meantime.
> 
> Based on the above, I suggest we don't invest any time trying to keep
> Debian 8 chugging along only to drop it in June, and instead declare
> it as unsupported right now and move on with our lives.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00006.html
> [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00003.html
> [3] https://libvirt.org/platforms.html
> [4] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
> -- 
> Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization
> 
> --
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Regards,
Daniel
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