Open Stack

I think there are two distinct use cases here.

To me, the PPA's have always been a QA tool. I wanted people willing to
help test OpenStack to be able to do so with as little effort as
possible.  Building packages per-commit gave us that.

It seems incredibly counterintuitive to me that someone who wants to
help us verify the stable branches need to jump through more hoops to do
so. IMO we should be as least as concerned about the quality of stable
updates as anything else. This is why I think we should be offering a
PPA with per-commit builds from the stable branch(es).

This is completely different from a "production" PPA. I wouldn't dream
of pointing people to the above mentioned PPA for their production
environment.  If someone wants to offer this outside of (but perhaps in
cooperation with) OpenStack, that'd be great. I'd be delighted to see
companies taking this on and offering a supported OpenStack
distribution, but I don't think this is our job for pretty much all the
same reasons Thierry outlines.

I propose we start building packages from the stable branches and put
them in an appropriately named/labeled PPA, such as nova-core/diablo-qa
or nova-core/diablo-not-for-production (or perhaps under
openstack-stable-maint).

At the same time, I'd like to propose that we limit ourselves to fewer
supported versions of Ubuntu (for trunk builds as well as these new,
stable branch builds).  Specifically:

 * Most recent LTS
 * Most recent release (which may or may not be an LTS)
 * Current development release

LTS's would go out of support when the subsequent LTS's first point
release is released. Non-LTS's would go out of support a month after the
subsequent release is out.

This means that right now, we'd build:

 * Lucid (until 12.04.1 is released (July 2012))
 * Oneiric (until May 2012)
 * Precise (until (probably) July 2014)

This gives people ample opportunity to upgrade to the next release and
at the same time reduces the amount of releases we need to worry about
significantly.

I think we'd get a valuable QA tool back and we'd reduce the burden of
maintaining the per-commit packages by having fewer distro versions to
worry about.

-- 
Soren Hansen        | http://linux2go.dk/
Ubuntu Developer    | http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer | http://www.openstack.org/