Design Session notes: tool chain (and other) dependencies of our build and runtime system

Design Session notes: tool chain (and other) dependencies of our build and runtime system

[Edwin Torok]

Hi,

These are the raw notes for this design session from the Xen Summit: https://design-sessions.xenproject.org/uid/discussion/disc_JEWVIhuv2TRAo2AXAZnP/view

Dependencies haven't been updated in quite some time:
 * Toolchain
 * system libraries, and other runtime deps

E.g. when to drop Python2.
Testing on old hardware might need it. Old hardware is difficult to keep running,
e.g. older than N years.
Vendors may not support it anymore, but that is a separate discussion.

What distros for newest versions of Xen, as minimum?

Minor releases keep working.
Next release can make another choice. Not necessarily actively break, but support might be best-effort.

Support old guests of course, but what about build?

Might limit testing on old hardware, if it is difficult to get new distros running on it.

E.g. after announcing new release, announce set of distros for master.
Update list at least once in release cycle.

make change for 4.18.

Accept nominations of distros from community for consideration, and then take decision.
Or perhaps use backport (e.g. EPEL).
Distros which have support policy (i.e. they say how long a particular release is supported).

Can't test everything on all distros, might be package version based. E.g. GCC >= version

CI testing vs do we want to fix the breakage or not even if we can't detect in CI

Informal survey on xen-users, resend patch on xen-devel (perhaps survey if lots of concerns raised)

Distro packages, even if not available by default.

Might be helpful: repology.org  for checking versions