A bit more follow up thoughts on backward compatibility about the PR https://github.com/apache/tvm/pull/7462 supporting target decalreation with target host like target("cuda", "llvm") or target('{"kind":"cuda", "host":"llvm"}').
The PR is backward compatible as demonstrated in @junrushao’s comment https://github.com/apache/tvm/pull/7462#issuecomment-781584977. And it does bring some changes, e.g., the name of the field in config dict changed from targer_host to host. Also, for any functions that have the argument of target_host, while the change is still backward compatible, new support for host field in target object would be required as @leandron pointed out in https://github.com/apache/tvm/pull/7462#discussion_r578322231. That means we would acutally have 2 ways to declare target host, from which we may choose one as preferred and deprecate the other one.
Would love to see more thoughts on how we should proceed on the preferred solution for the backward compatibility issue. Further updates on the documents and tutorials would also be addressed after we have consensus on the design.