Open Stack

> 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

Thanks for the excellent further background on these questions.

I'd just like to clarify one point about the notion of backporting
dependencies such as mongodb.

Would the expectation be that the OpenStack community drives that
backporting process, or simply rely on the relevant distro community
to provide the backported version in a consumable form?

I ask because in this individual case, of the mongodb dependency, a
backport for precise of the required version has been available in
the Ubuntu Cloud Archive, just not in a form that is consumable by
the gate (IIRC the issue was that enabling the UCA caused a broken
version of libvirt to be picked up as a side-effect).

Cheers,
Eoghan