Re: [Xen-devel] [libvirt] Fixing libvirt's libxl driver breakage -- where to define LIBXL_API_VERSION?

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 10:09:16AM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 10:31 PM, Jim Fehlig <jfehlig@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Wei Liu wrote:
> >> Hi libvirt maintainers,
> >
> > Sorry for the delay. Slowly catching up on mail after vacation...
> >
> >>
> >> Xen's control library libxenlight (libxl) requires application
> >> (libvirt in this case) to explictily define LIBXL_API_VERSION.
> >
> > Where is this requirement written? :-)
> >
> >> This is
> >> lacking at the moment so libvirt's libxl driver always gets the latest
> >> APIs.
> >
> > IMO, that is what we want for upstream libvirt. Downstreams can choose a
> > specific version if they want.
> 
> I think one of us isn't understanding the situation properly. Is it
> not the case that currently, all releases of libvirt *will not
> compile* against Xen 4.7 once it's released?  So people downloading
> and building libvirt will have to either 1) root around and try to
> figure out what version of Xen it will build against, 2) manually add
> in a #define *with the correct API version* to a header somewhere to
> make it build properly, or 3) update to a version of libvirt that
> supports the new api (which at the moment hasn't even been released
> yet)?
> 
> All of those options are completely unacceptable.  Older versions of
> libvirt should Just Work when compiled against newer versions of Xen.
> 
> I think it does make sense to have the libvirt development branch not
> specify an API version; but when it branches for release, it should
> set LIBXL_API_VERSION to whatever the current version is at the time
> of the branch.

FYI, libvirt doesn't do branching for releases - we always just cut the
release straight from the master branch. We only actually create branches
on demand, when we find we want to backport fixes to a previous release.

Does libvirt master really need to always use the latest API version ?

It feels like libvirt could just set LIBXL_API_VERSION to the lowest
version it requires in order to get the functionality we know we are
able to currently build against. IOW, we'd only need to update the
define for LIBXL_API_VERSION when we merge patches that actually need
the newer functionality.

Regards,
Daniel
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