Re: [PATCH] docs/about: Automatically deprecate versioned machine types older than 6 years

On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 08:45:29AM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote: > Old machine types often have bugs or work-arounds that affect our > possibilities to move forward with the QEMU code base (see for example > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2213 for a bug that likely > cannot be fixed without breaking live migration with old machine types, > or https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-12/msg04516.html or > commit ea985d235b86). So instead of going through the process of manually > deprecating old machine types again and again, let's rather add an entry > that can stay, which declares that machine types older than 6 years are > considered as deprecated automatically. Six years should be sufficient to > support the release cycles of most Linux distributions. If anyone thinks 6 years is not very long, consider that this implies QEMU will be maintaining *18* versions for each versioned machine type. So across aarch64 'virt', x86 'pc' & 'q35', ppc 'spapr', s390x 'ccw', and m68k 'virt', that's upto 108 machines we're keeping ABI preserved for in the worst case...