Open Stack

[Removed the previous stuff, it was getting messy. And sorry for this long email, I tried to make it shorter, really.]

Okay, cool. Seems we all thought someone else was managing it so nobody really was. A few quick points and maybe we can get this all sorted out:

* Most of us (me, chuck, redbo, notmyname, and others) are not experts at packaging. We manage to get by, but it's highly doubtful we'd do it "right" according to specs out there. It just isn't something dear to our hearts.

* There are many packages for many distros folks are going to want: Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu latest, Ubuntu next, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, etc. We're even less experts when it comes to all of those.


What Rackspace Could Files needs from packaging -- our needs may align with others here, but they aren't intended to:

* Built for whatever OS we're using, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at this time. We will move to the next LTS when it comes out, but in our own time as testing and production rollouts allow.

* Controllable updates, in that new packages are created but not put in the repo until they've been tested fully. This is so kicks of new boxes always get a tested package set, not one that just got built minutes before but not yet tested.


We're never going to have everyone on the same cycles, OSes, etc. Official packages, production packages for various companies (Cloud Files, CloudScaling, etc.) Rackspace Cloud Servers might settle on something different than Cloud Files. That's all normal and trying to get everyone to do exactly the same thing just isn't realistic.

OpenStack automated testing isn't there yet, and probably won't be for a long time. Just running unit tests doesn't cut it. We stage the packages we build, run unit and functional tests, run some more tests our QA has, and run specific manual tests that target known changed areas since the last packages. There are times we've been concerned enough about some changes that we've reset our testing cluster and then ran days long tests loading the system to full.

With that said, I think whoever needs whatever should do whatever. :) We (the Cloud Files team) are going to keep doing what we need to for packaging. We're perfectly fine with sharing that (except maybe some of the Rackspace-specific QA stuff [our auth, control panel, CDN, etc.]). We're perfectly fine if nobody uses that or if they just use it as an example starting point.

If somebody really cares about official Ubuntu packages (and I suspect folks do) then somebody should go ahead and do that. I know there are Red Hat (and other) guys doing packaging for themselves.

I think what I'd like to see (and maybe the rest of the Cloud Files team, but I don't want to definitively speak for them):

* The Cloud Files Packaging be made available, probably via github. We can do this and just haven't because we thought it'd upset some folks and confuse others.

* "Somebody else", probably you guys on John Purrier's team, do the official OpenStack Ubuntu Packages however you want, wherever you want.

* A way to communicate packaging-impacting changes to each other. Maybe subscribing to repos and email list would be enough? Consider Cloud Files as just one of the many roll-your-own packagers out there, like Red Hat, SUSE, CloudScaling, etc. We'll all need good communication lines to the standard OpenStack Packaging.