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On 06/18/2014 03:10 PM, Clark Boylan wrote:
> We are working on Trusty honest (I just got nodepool to build our
> first Trusty images), and that solves this problem. There is a bigger
> underlying issue in that projects should not depend on things like
> mongodb versions which are not available on the current Ubuntu LTS...
> pretty sure that is what the TC meant by not breaking the LTS
> releases. But that is worth its own thread :)

Nope. (although I agree with everything ELSE in your email)

What the TC meant was "we'll target latest release, but we don't want to
start depending on anything that can't reasonably backported"

Examples of this include Python versions. It's not reasonable (or not
seen to be reasonable) to backport, say, python 2.7 to a distro release
that _only_ has 2.6 if the distro doesn't already have support for
side-by-side pythons because that would mean upgrading the base python
which might break system-wide things.

On the other hand, backporting mongodb or MySQL or libvirt are pretty
reasonable, since even installing a completely new version of those
things is unlikely to have unforseen knockon effects.

Python libraries from pip are the easiest version of this - since we
REALLY don't care what version the distro ships and it doesn't matter
because the backport is trivial.

NOW - does that mean we should just willy nilly use things if they can
be backported? No. It's a thing we can do, but there is still a cost for
us to gate on something that's not in the distro we gate on. Mongodb is
a great example here. CAN it be backported? Yup. But if we're going to
use it in our gate, where does it come from? How long is that version
going to be supported? Is it going to match the 18 months we need a
distro release to be around to be able to support running CI tests on
stable branches? See - that gets tricky.

Long story short:
 - easy with python libraries
 - hard but doable if necessary for C-based non-core linux things like mongo
 - out of the question for core os components like python