Open Stack

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:04 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Chris Jones's message of 2014-01-07 14:43:31 -0800:
>> Hi
>>
>> > On 7 Jan 2014, at 22:18, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
>> > Packages do the opposite,
>> > and encourage entropy by promising to try and update software
>>
>> Building with packages doesn't require updating running systems with packages and more than building with git requires updating running systems with git pull.
>> One can simply build (and test!) a new image with updated packages and rebuild/takeover nodes.
>>
>
> Indeed, however one can _more_ simply build an image without package
> tooling...  and they will be more similar across multiple platforms.
>
> My question still stands, what are the real advantages? So far the only
> one that matters to me is "makes it easier for people to think about
> using it."

I'm reminded of when I first started looking at TripleO there were a
few issues with installing from git (I'll say that from now on :)
related to all the python distribute -> setuptools migration.  Things
like if you're base cloud image had the wrong version of pip you
couldn't migrate to setuptools cleanly.  Then you had to run the
setuptools update twice, once to get the distribute legacy wrapper and
then again to latest setuptools.  If I recall there were other
problems with virtualenv incompatibilities as well.

Arguably, installing from packages would have made that easier and less complex.

Sure, the crux of the problem was likely that versions in the distro
were too old and they needed to be updated.  But unless we take on
building the whole OS from source/git/whatever every time, we're
always going to have that issue.  So, an additional benefit of
packages is that you can install a known good version of an OpenStack
component that is known to work with the versions of dependent
software you already have installed.

-- 
-- James Slagle
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