Open Stack

Hi everyone!

1/ Announcement
===============

I'm pleased to announce, in advance of the final Liberty release, that
Liberty RC1 not only has been fully uploaded to Debian Experimental, but
also that the Tempest CI (which I maintain and is a package only CI, no
deployment tooling involved), shows that it's also fully installable and
working. There's still some failures, but these are, I am guessing, not
due to problems in the packaging, but rather some Tempest setup problems
which I intend to address.

If you want to try out Liberty RC1 in Debian, you can either try it
using Debian Sid + Experimental (recommended), or use the Jessie
backport repository built out of Mirantis Jenkins server. Repositories
are listed at this address:

http://liberty-jessie.pkgs.mirantis.com/

2/ Quick note about Liberty Debian repositories
===============================================

During Debconf 15, someone reported that the fact the Jessie backports
are on a Mirantis address is disturbing.

Note that, while the above really is a non-Debian (ie: non official
private) repository, it only contains unmodified source packages, only
just rebuilt for Debian Stable. Please don't be afraid by the tainted
"mirantis.com" domain name, I could have as well set a debian.net
address (which has been on my todo list for a long time). But it is
still Debian only packages. Everything there is strait out of Debian
repositories, nothing added, modified or removed.

I believe that Liberty release in Sid, is currently working very well,
but I haven't tested it as much as the Jessie backport.

Started with the Kilo release, I have been uploading packages to the
official Debian backports repositories. I will do so as well for the
Liberty release, after the final release is out, and after Liberty is
fully migrated to Debian Testing (the rule for stable-backports is that
packages *must* be available in Testing *first*, in order to provide an
upgrade path). So I do expect Liberty to be available from
jessie-backports maybe a few weeks *after* the final Liberty release.
Before that, use the unofficial Debian repositories.

3/ Horizon dependencies still in NEW queue
==========================================

It is also worth noting that Horizon hasn't been fully FTP master
approved, and that some packages are still remaining in the NEW queue.
This isn't the first release with such an issue with Horizon. I hope
that 1/ FTP masters will approve the remaining packages son 2/ for
Mitaka, the Horizon team will care about freezing external dependencies
(ie: new Javascript objects) earlier in the development cycle. I am
hereby proposing that the Horizon 3rd party dependency freeze happens
not later than Mitaka b2, so that we don't experience it again for the
next release. Note that this problem affects both Debian and Ubuntu, as
Ubuntu syncs dependencies from Debian.

5/ New packages in this release
===============================

You may have noticed that the below packages are now part of Debian:
- Manila
- Aodh
- ironic-inspector
- Zaqar (this one is still in the FTP masters NEW queue...)

I have also packaged a few more, but there are still blockers:
- Congress (antlr version is too low in Debian)
- Mistral

6/ Roadmap for Liberty final release
====================================

Next on my roadmap for the final release of Liberty, is finishing to
upgrade the remaining components to the latest version tested in the
gate. It has been done for most OpenStack deliverables, but about a
dozen are still in the lowest version supported by our global-requirements.

There's also some remaining work:
- more Neutron drivers
- Gnocchi
- Address the remaining Tempest failures, and widen the scope of tests
(add Sahara, Heat, Swift and others to the tested projects using the
Debian package CI)

I of course welcome everyone to test Liberty RC1 before the final
release, and report bugs on the Debian bug tracker if needed.

Also note that the Debian packaging CI is fully free software, and part
of Debian as well (you can look into the openstack-meta-packages package
in git.debian.org, and in openstack-pkg-tools). Contributions in this
field are also welcome.

7/ Thanks to Canonical & every OpenStack upstream projects
==========================================================

I'd like to point out that, even though I did the majority of the work
myself, for this release, there was a way more collaboration with
Canonical on the dependency chain. Indeed, for this Liberty release,
Canonical decided to upload every dependency to Debian first, and then
only sync from it. So a big thanks to the Canonical server team for
doing community work with me together. I just hope we could push this
even further, especially trying to have consistency for Nova and Neutron
binary package names, as it is an issue for Puppet guys.

Last, I would like to hereby thanks everyone who helped me fixing issues
in these packages. Thank you if you've been patient enough to explain,
and for your understanding when I wrongly thought an issue was upstream
when it really was in really in the packages. Thank you, IRC people, you
are all awesome guys!

8/ Note about Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 and 8.0
============================================

When reading these words, MOS and Fuel 7.0 should already be out. For
this release, lots of package sources have been taken directly from
Debian. It is on our roadmap to push this effort even further for MOS
8.0 (working over Trusty). I am please that this happens, so that the
community version of OpenStack (ie: the Debian OpenStack) will have the
benefits of more QA. I also hope that the project of doing packaging on
upstream OpenStack Gerrit with gating will happen at least for a few
packages during the Mitaka cycle, and that Debian will become the common
community platform for OpenStack as I always wanted it to be.

Happy OpenStack Liberty hacking,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)