Re: [Qemu-devel] rawhide gcc failures [was: Proposal for deprecating unsupported host OSes & architecutures]

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On 22 March 2017 at 19:07, Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:
> Tangentially-related: do we officially support bleeding-edge OS builds?
> For example, current rawhide has a new-enough gcc that gives some
> (possibly-useful) new warnings (-Werror=format-truncation)

Depends what you mean by "support". Are we testing them
in our build/CI loop? Apparently not :-) Do we fix them?
Yep, certainly, because bleeding-edge libraries and
compilers will eventually be standard ones. Do we fix
them during the release process? Yes, but maybe if
the fix is very invasive somehow we might prefer to
postpone to the next release. Do we consider them
a release-critical bug that we'd spin an extra rc
for? I don't think so, because (a) for released tarballs
-Werror is not on by default (b) even for building from
git you can work around this with -disable-werror
(c) it's just an accident of timing if a new gcc drops
3 weeks before release rather than 3 weeks after, so
it's always possible that releases will end up being
built on compilers that warn about things in them.

More generally, I'm not going to go so far as to insist
that we have a build machine for every flavour of every
distro -- that would not usefully improve coverage I think.
Also I'm happy to be ad-hoc about exactly what we test
(my x86 Linux builds are just "the Ubuntu flavour my
desktop box happens to be running right now") because
being less ad-hoc feels like it would be work that
we don't really need to engage in.

thanks
-- PMM