On Sat, 2022-03-19 at 08:14 +0100, Alexander Kanavin wrote:

Please no. EOL means EOL, if you want additional commits, make a
private fork and cherry-pick there. Or arrange some kind of community
ELTS effort (those tend to fizzle out though :).

That bitbake change did go back as it was straight forward to do, helped people
and saved us from a ton of "eek, how do I fix this" support emails. It was
simple enough that we could be reasonably certain it might help and was
relatively unlikely to make anything much worse. It took it back as far as the
code was similar enough the patch applied iirc.

Starting to patch qemu is a different level of change, particularly patching it
to work on systems that weren't around when it was originally released or
maintained.

There were efforts to try support efforts on older branches. I went as far as
setting up most of the autobuilder pieces needed to make this happen, which took
quite a bit of my time. The people saying they planned to do it then
didn't/couldn't.

The issue is I don't really want to merge patches onto the branches without
testing and we don't have a testing mechanism left for the older releases. There
is a level of quality assurance people expect from changes being merged and we
can't meet that now. Trying to support that ends up eating my time in
particular. To be honest, with the load on the autobuilder now, we're running
low on testing resources too unfortunately.

Cheers,

Richard