[Openstack] Providing packages for stable releases of OpenStack

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Wed Nov 30 12:42:09 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 13:07 +0100, Soren Hansen wrote:
> I think there are two distinct use cases here.

Totally agree. We need to make it as easy as possible for people to test
upstream git branches and releases.

> 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).

I'm not convinced that distribution specific packaging is the best way
to go about this.

I want Fedora users to be able to test out, and get involved with,
upstream as easily as Ubuntu users are. Same for other distros. The
thought of getting into the game of maintaining this upstream packaging
for multiple distros, and e.g. having to make sure any dependencies are
packaged for these distros ... ugh.

I don't have anything concrete to offer as an alternative, but I'd love
to see something like devstack that runs either from git or tarballs and
supports multiple distributions.

Or maybe the answer is for OpenStack to publish everything to pypi and
something like devstack which uses a virtualenv.

There's also the likes of jhbuild, GARGNOME, minuteman and surely more -
perhaps we can take a leaf out of their books?

But until something like this exists, I guess you're right - throwing
out the per-commit PPAs is a backward step. However, I think Thierry's
point was about PPAs containing packaged releases (e.g. 2011.3.1)

Cheers,
Mark.





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