Re: [libvirt] Limiting old version back compat for language bindings ?

On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 01:58:10PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > Can't we follow the same policy as the main library? That would make > it more straightforward to reason about. Also note that our CI only > runs jobs on the platforms targeted by the main library, which means > RHEL 6 and Ubuntu 14.04 are out already... I don't think this is the same kind of situation at play, because of how it interacts with application developers expressing their dependancies for the language bindings. If an app expresses a dep on the oldest version of libvirt-python they support they can't use APIs newer than that. If an app expresses a dep on the newest version of libvirt-python they can use, then they can conditionally use the new APIs while still being compatible with the older ihnstalls. This works regardless of our support policy wrt the main libvirt EOL. If we put the same EOL policy on the language bindings, we're either forcing the application onto the same support policy as libvirt, or making their build / deployment process more complicated, neither of which I think are reasonable. With main libvirt library our EOL policy is a great benefit so us as it dramatically lowers our maint burden. This makes it worth the cost for people who might wish to deploy libvirt on older systems. The language bindings do not have a high maint cost from supporting old versions, so it doesn't justify creating pain for application developers by dropping support so aggressively as for main libvirt. A time based scheme for dropping old versions in language bindings is very easy to describe to people & apply ourselves, more so than our main policy which needs us to research versions across distros every time we change something.