[libvirt] [PATCH] build: restore support for libyajl 2.0.1

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 04:10:36PM +0200, Olaf Hering wrote:
> Am Thu,  9 May 2019 13:31:45 +0200
> schrieb Ján Tomko <jtomko at redhat.com>:
> 
> > +    dnl TODO: delete this in July 2020
> 
> Does this come with a cost? I mean, SLE_12 is not going away any time soon.
> Just dropping things because we can seems to be the wrong approach.

Historically we almost never dropped stuff, and when we did it was
completely unpredictable and arbitrary each time. Maintaining support
for old software has a maint cost so it is desirable to drop things
after a period of time. Thus we defined a platform support rules
for when we will drop distros so that downstream vendors/ users have
clear expectations:

  https://libvirt.org/platforms.html

SLE is falls under the long life distros rule, so we have at most
2 major versions supported at any time, and the older version is
dropped 2 years after the newer version is released.

Our belief is that this cut off point for the old major version
is long enough that people still using this older version are
doing so becasue they want unchanging stable versions, not the
bleeding edge. IOW, after SLE 15 has been released for 2 years,
it is increasingly unlikely that most people will want to run
new libvirt on SLE 12. There will always be people who are the
exception to the rule, but on balance this is a good tradeoff
between maint cost for libvirt vs likely usage by downstream.

This same policy has also been now adopted by QEMU.

Regards,
Daniel
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