Open Stack

Fox, Kevin M wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> I normally side with the distro's take on making sure there is no duplication, but I think Thierry's point comes from two differences coming up that the traditional distro's don't tend to account for.

(and to be fair, I normally side with the distro's take too... If you 
asked me the same question 5 years ago I would be taking exactly the 
same side as Thomas)

> [...]
> To Thierry's point about newer distro's, there are distro's today starting to form around Docker as a packaging device and it does not have the same issues that traditional distro's do. Fedora/Redhat Atomic, CoreOS, RancherOS are some examples. You can run incompatible rabbit's on the same server. Both can be patched to the latest secure version, but simply incompatible with each other. Say a stable v1 branch and a stable v2 branch. They probably share every package except 1, and at a file system level actually do share all the space but the change.

Yes, you could imagine a container-based server distro that would deploy 
complex stacks (beyond the base system) as official containers (or 
pods). To avoid the maintenance/security/bundling nightmare, they would 
still reproducibly build those containers from a finite collection of 
base packages, but in that collection there could be multiple versions 
of the same library. If a security issue appears, you can still 
determine which base packages are affected and update them all, then 
refresh all containers that happen to use those packages.

It is totally technically doable, it would be a "sane way to maintain 
software" (just a different one), and it would meet the needs of 
everyone (the rift between distros and upstream is not affecting just 
OpenStack).

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)