Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> writes:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 08:58:09PM -0300, Fabiano Rosas wrote:
>> Hi, I just wanted to share and ask for feedback on some container images
>> I've been building as part of my testing of migration pull-requests.
>>
>> From a Dockerfile from ./tests/docker/dockerfiles/ I'm producing the
>> following:
>>
>> $ docker images
>> qemu-build-base:11.0.0 b6efa198e93a 5.8GB
>> qemu-rootfs-base:11.0.0 72bcb5418f4d 4.08GB
>> qemu:11.0.0 018a3f0f4dcc 2GB
>
> snip
>
>> 2) Neither the QEMU build nor the distro repos are reliable enough to
>> allow me to just "go back in time" and rebuild at any moment, I need to
>> keep the artifacts cached to avoid rebuilding. Otherwise it comes time
>> to send a PR and I discover that some python piece has changed or the
>> distro messed up the older repository.
>
> Yes, in general building old QEMU on new distros periodically
> hits trouble. If building old QEMU, better reliability is
> achieved by using a distro release that was from the same
> timeframe as QEMU. Is using containers targetting such old
> distro versions not an option ? The tests/docker/dockerfiles
> from the old QEMU branch ought to work ?
>
Yes, I'm doing just that. Some tweaks are needed still. For instance, my
script has something like this:
dockerfile="tests/docker/dockerfiles/opensuse-leap.docker"
sed -i 's/ncurses-devel//' $dockerfile
if [ "$tag" = "10.1.0" ]; then
sed -i 's/libLLVM19//' $dockerfile
fi
> Our stable release branches have the same needs, and their
> CI is using the container images from the old branches.
>
> How far back in time do you need/want to go for migration
> testing ? Is it sufficient to merely target versions for
> which mjt is still doing active maint work, so we can
> expect the containers to still work.
>
I'm currently testing against the previous 3 releases. I think 2
releases is probably enough.
> With regards,
> Daniel
