Open Stack

On 01/09/2015 05:24 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 01/09/2015 06:12 PM, Solly Ross wrote:
>> Hi,                                                                             
>> I just noticed that noVNC was disabled by default in devstack (the relevant     
>> change was                                                                      
>> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/140860/).                                      
>>                                                                                 
>> Now, if I understand correctly (based on the short commit message), the         
>> rationale is that we don't want devstack to reply on non-OpenStack Git          
>> repos, so that devstack doesn't fail when some external Git hosting             
>> service (e.g. GitHub) goes down.
> 
> Realistically the policy is more about the fact that we should be using
> released (and commonly available) versions of dependent software.
> Ideally from packages, but definitely not from git trees. We don't want
> to be testing everyone else's bleeding edge, there are lots of edges and
> pointy parts in OpenStack as it is.
> 
>>                                                                                 
>> This is all fine and dandy (and a decent idea, IMO), but this leaves devstack   
>> installing a "broken" installation of Horizon by default -- Horizon still      
>> attempts to show the noVNC console when you go to the "console" tab for an      
>> instance, which is a bit confusing, initially.  Now, it wasn't particularly     
>> hard to track not particularly hard to track down *why* this happened (hmm...   
>> my stackrc seems to be missing "n-novnc" in ENABLED_SERVICES.  Go-go-gadget     
>> `git blame`), but it strikes me as a bit inconsistent and inconvenient.         
>>                                                                                 
>> Personally, I would like to see noVNC back as a default service, since it       
>> can be useful when trying to see what your VM is actually doing during          
>> boot, or if you're having network issues.  Is there anything I can do           
>> as a noVNC maintainer to help?                                                  
>>                                                                                 
>> We (the noVNC team) do publish releases, and I've been trying to make           
>> sure that they happen in a more timely fashion.  In the past, it was necessary  
>> to use Git master to ensure that you got the latest version (there was a        
>> 2-year gap between 0.4 and 0.5!), but I'm trying to change that.  Currently,    
>> it would appear that most of the distros are still using the old version (0.4), 
>> but versions 0.5 and 0.5.1 are up on GitHub as release tarballs (0.5 being a 3  
>> months old and 0.5.1 having been tagged a couple weeks ago).  I will attempt to 
>> work with distro maintainers to get the packages updated.  However, in the mean 
>> time, is there a place would be acceptable to place the releases so that devstack
>> can install them?
> 
> If you rewrite the noNVC installation in devstack to work from a release
> URL that includes the released version on it, I think that would be
> sufficient to turn it back on. Again, ideally this should be in distros,

FWIW, I looked into installing novnc from distro packages quite a while
ago and ran into problems because the dependencies were wonky.  Like,
novnc would pull in Nova which then overwrote a bunch of the devstack
Nova stuff.  I don't know if that's still an issue, but that's the main
reason I never pushed ahead with removing the git install of novnc (that
was during the release drought, so those weren't an option at the time
either).

> but I think we could work on doing release installs until then,
> especially if the install process is crisp.
> 
> I am looking at the upstream release tarball right now though, and don't
> see and INSTALL instructions in it. So lets see what the devstack patch
> would look like to do the install.
> 
> 	-Sean
>