doc: add note on hardware support deprecation

Following agreement at the DPDK Technical Board meeting [1], the policy
that hardware support deprecation should be treated as though it were an
ABI break needs to be documented in the contributors guide.

[1] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-September/074613.html

Signed-off-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
Acked-by: John McNamara <john.mcnamara@intel.com>

diff --git a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst
index 8aaf370..8d0fdb7 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst
+++ b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst
@@ -18,6 +18,8 @@ General Guidelines
 #. The modification of symbols can generally be managed with versioning
 #. The removal of symbols generally is an ABI break and requires bumping of the
    LIBABIVER macro
+#. Updates to the minimum hardware requirements, which drop support for hardware which
+   was previously supported, should be treated as an ABI change.
 
 What is an ABI
 --------------
@@ -77,6 +79,13 @@ for significant reasons, such as performance enhancements. ABI breakage due to
 changes such as reorganizing public structure fields for aesthetic or
 readability purposes should be avoided.
 
+.. note::
+
+   Updates to the minimum hardware requirements, which drop support for hardware
+   which was previously supported, should be treated as an ABI change, and
+   follow the relevant deprecation policy procedures as above: 3 acks and
+   announcement at least one release in advance.
+
 Examples of Deprecation Notices
 -------------------------------