Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] block: deprecate the sheepdog block driver

This thread from a little over a year ago: http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/sheepdog/2019-March/thread.html states that sheepdog is no longer actively developed. The only mentioned users are some companies who are said to have it for legacy reasons with plans to replace it by Ceph. There is talk about cutting out existing features to turn it into a simple demo of how to write a distributed block service. There is no evidence of anyone working on that idea: https://github.com/sheepdog/sheepdog/commits/master No real commits to git since Jan 2018, and before then just some minor technical debt cleanup.. There is essentially no activity on the mailing list aside from patches to QEMU that get CC'd due to our MAINTAINERS entry. Fedora packages for sheepdog failed to build from upstream source because of the more strict linker that no longer merges duplicate global symbols. Fedora patches it to add the missing "extern" annotations and presumably other distros do to, but upstream source remains broken. There is only basic compile testing, no functional testing of the driver. Since there are no build pre-requisites the sheepdog driver is currently enabled unconditionally. This would result in configure issuing a deprecation warning by default for all users. Thus the configure default is changed to disable it, requiring users to pass --enable-sheepdog to build the driver. Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; --- block/sheepdog.c | 15 +++++++++++++++ configure | 5 +++-- docs/system/deprecated.rst | 9 +++++++++ 3 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)