[Discussion] Proxmox supported versions (and whether to deprecate/drop them)

[Lithimlin]

Summary

To work on some issues, I am currently refactoring the proxmox module.

While working on that, it came up again and again that technically, any version of Proxmox, even below 4.0 is supported. This raised the question for me on whether this is 1) necessary or 2) even desirable. The Debian versions those old Proxmox versions are based on are long at their EOL and get no more (security) updates.

This particularly came up when trying to figure out how the storage parameter works now.
In the module docs, it says for the disk parameter:

Older versions of Proxmox will accept a numeric value for size using the storage parameter to automatically choose which storage to allocate from [...]

And while I can find the storage parameter in the API Docs (see the POST tab), I cannot figure out if/for what it is even still being used now. This is not necessarily a problem regarding supported versions, but further complicates the existing issues.

To summarize, my main questions are:

1. Is support of all Proxmox versions necessary?
2. Is support of all Proxmox versions desirable?
3. Does anyone know where I can check what the storage parameter is being used for since the numeric value for disk/rootfs is no longer valid?
4. Additionally, does anyone know when this behaviour changed? I could narrow it down to somewhere between versions 4.0 and 5.0 using the Proxmox Wiki (old post vs new post).

Issue Type

Discussion

Component Name

proxmox

Additional Information

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[Lithimlin]

Moved to the Maintainer Discussions

[Lithimlin]

Reopened after finding out that here is the correct to post this after all.

[Lithimlin]

It seems that the behavior of using rootfs and storage hasn't changed at all and was simply extended upon (see #9065).
So only the questions regarding the supported versions remain.

[felixfontein]

Right now the module supports all Proxmox versions it did support in the past, since it doesn't mention which versions it supports.

To change this, it's necessary to deprecate support for older versions, so we can officially drop support for them in the next (or second next) major release of community.general.

[Lithimlin]

First off we should probably see if deprecating older support is necessary.
For the specific issue I was having (rootfs and storage), that behavior is still supported in the current API.

The bigger question is whether supporting versions below 4.0 (without LXC support) makes sense.

[Thulium-Drake]

I don't see an issue with deprecating versions that are no longer maintained by Proxmox themselves. That doesn't have to mean that we actively remove stuff or change stuff that no longer is supported. But it can allow changes to the modules that might break on older versions of the API.

[IamLunchbox]

I think it is not strictly necessary, since apparently proxmox themselves try to keep breaking changes to a minimum.

But since proxmox does have a clear support policy, I think it does not harm either to adhere to their policy - especially since they might deprecate features in the future.

[Lithimlin]

The biggest change would come from dropping support below PVE4.0, since that removes the openvz-type containers in favor of LXCs.