On 13.11.2017 10:53, Peter Maydell wrote: > On 13 November 2017 at 07:14, Thomas Huth <th...@redhat.com> wrote: >> By the way, before everybody now introduces "2.12" machine types ... is >> there already a consensus that the next version will be "2.12" ? >> >> A couple of months ago, we discussed that we could maybe do a 3.0 after >> 2.11, e.g. here: >> >> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-03/msg05056.html >> >> I'd still like to see that happen... Peter, any thoughts on this? > > I don't see the point in declaring a 3.0 unless we have some > sweeping change that merits it. I don't think we should do a > sweeping change unless we have a well laid out and agreed on > plan for how the transition works.
Since we declared a lot of interfaces / features as deprecated in QEMU 2.10, we could finally remove them in the release after 2.11. Looking at https://qemu.weilnetz.de/doc/qemu-doc.html#Deprecated-features that's quite a bit already. That's IMHO a good justification for a 3.0 already. > So I would want to see the > plan discussed and agreed first, and then we can say "ok, and > we think we can do this in this timescale and so the version > at $DATE will be 3.0". We could maybe also start a wiki page to collect ideas for what we want to do with "3.0" ... but I guess a lot of the possible changes will just be turned down again since somebody will cry "we need to stay compatible with older versions! Forever!". So I somehow doubt that this is worth the effort. > Changing the version number should be > the last part of this process, not the first, in my view. Yeah, but you know how this works in QEMU-Land: Once the 2.12 is established in the heads of various people, we'll have a hard time to bump the version number again, since there's always somebody complaining... So I guess we'll likely end up doing it rather the Linux kernel way one day - when we feel that the minor number got too big (three digits, maybe?), we'll switch the major number without any further justification ;-) Thomas