Hi Michael, First, my apologies, I hadn't noticed you were one of the maintainers of the package when I wrote my response, so it was written thinking I was talking to someone uninvolved in the process who had offered suggestions while stating a lack of familiarity with the problem domain, not someone who every well-informed person in the discussion would know was quite familiar with qemu a priori, and is just stating they have no experience in this one area. (I have no particular insight into why I reached this conclusion, but somehow I did.)
I very much appreciate that you've done everything you can reasonably do at the moment to provide a reasonably recent and patched set of software - I know the freeze meant that 6.0 couldn't turn up in unstable, much less bullseye, which in turn means that buster-backports wasn't going to see anything, and buster is, as you say, obviously a complete nonstarter. I'm no stranger to building and running my own packages, so that's not really the issue, it just seems unfortunate to keep shipping a program that has a nontrivial chance of crashing and burning every time it's run, and there being no real potential for that changing. (Of course, you might not know that's the case until well after it's in stable, at which point it's not getting dropped short of earth-shattering catastrophe...) I'm not claiming to have a good idea for how to resolve or even mitigate this, other than perhaps a breakdown somewhere easily discoverable of "we expect these tools to work reliably, these few usually work for most people, and these forsaken ones may torch the crops and salt the earth while laughing". (A warning on first run of any of the more exciting options in qemu-user-static or if any of qemu-system-* fit the bill would probably be troublesome, at least in the common former case of being used to run non-native binaries...) I had not asked upstream for help because they pretty clearly state [1] that they don't provide support for older or distro-provided versions, and as I mentioned before, when I tried building 6.0 against buster, it blew up spectacularly. (Of course, with bullseye out and 6.1 sitting happily in unstable, this becomes much more accessible...once I take the plunge on my main systems, at least. And it seems moot anyway, because I've been hanging out in their IRC channel, and nobody seems to be getting turned away for running older or distro versions, just gently suggested that it might be resolved already.) Thank you again for your work, and I'm sorry that I came across as an ungrateful entitled person. - Rich [1] - https://www.qemu.org/support/ On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 10:46 AM Michael Tokarev <m...@tls.msk.ru> wrote: > > 04.07.2021 15:02, Rich wrote: > > When I tried building qemu 6.0 or git on buster, as I recall it > > errored out on dependencies not available in sufficiently new > > incarnations, even in backports. > > > > If the answer to "this is quite buggy" is "just run a version not even > > in unstable yet", that's...quite unfortunate. > > > > If you're just saying this because it's qemu upstream's opinion, well, > > I knew that. :) > > Hi Rich! > > I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this was all I was able to offer. > It is not "qemu upstream's opinion", it is my opinion, - it fells > like riscv64 in 3.1 was quite buggy and there's nothing I can do > about it, - I definitely wont backport changes from 6.0 to buster's > 3.1 version. > > Usually qemu builds quite well on current distributions, including > debian buster. I backported 5.2 version (from bullseye) for buster > together with 2 or 3 new dependencies which were not in buster. > > I can not, at the time, provide a more recent version of qemu > (6.0) even for unstable since - at the time - debian was frozen > before bullseye release. However, I did provide 6.0 version > in experimental - this is the only way I know to actually > provide a new upstream version for debian during freeze. > Ofcourse I can't provide backport of 6.0 for buster since it > wasn't in bullsyeye or instable. > > So your disapproval of my answer stays solely with you - I did > everything I was able to do. And I definitely suggested you the > only realistic - to my opinion - way to go forward - which is to > try either latest stable version or even the current development > version. Because this is the only way to ensure if the bug you're > seeing is already fixed. > > Meanwhile, 6.1 has been released (yesterday) and it is already > available on debian unstable today. > > /mjt
