Open Stack

Hi everyone,

TL;DR summary:
An openstack-ppa [1] team in Launchpad was created to take clear
responsibility of maintaining the various OpenStack PPAs. Those will be
reworked in order to fill holes not covered in our distribution
landscape and to avoid carrying false expectations.

Long version:
The OpenStack PPAs in Launchpad (providing various packages of OpenStack
projects for various versions of Ubuntu) have a long and conflicted
history. They started as core-dev-maintained trunk "daily" packages,
then were made an integrated part of OpenStack release process, then
were maintained by a team common with Ubuntu developers (while still
being owned by OpenStack core dev teams), to finally be versed into the
CI bucket (mostly because the same members happen to work on it). The
net result was that nobody was really owning them, and issues were left
unfixed.

In order to clearly delimit responsibility between teams (and to own the
new PPAs), a separate openstack-ppa team [1] was created. This team was
seeded with interested members of openstack-ci but is open to new
members with Launchpad PPA and Debian packaging experience. Bugs can be
filed against the openstack-ppa project [2] in Launchpad, or existing
packaging bugs that need to be fixed in OpenStack PPAs can be marked as
"also affecting project" openstack-ppa.

The team will encourage collaboration with Ubuntu to share packaging
trees, and maintain a limited number of unified PPAs that are clearly
targeted to developer/tester audiences. Those PPAs will be considered
like another downstream distribution of OpenStack and not special-cased:
in particular producing PPA packages after a given openstack milestone
or release will no longer be a formal part of the official OpenStack
release process (which should only produce tarballs that are consumed by
a set of downstream distributions). This will dramatically reduce the
time necessary to produce OpenStack milestones and releases and put all
distributions on an equal footing.

To have a rough idea of what we plan to do, you can have a look at the
bugs at [3]. In particular, we plan to deprecate the "release PPAs"
since they carry a false expectation of being maintained with stable
branch updates and be production-ready. We also plan to regroup the PPAs
(avoid having separate PPAs per project) to avoid duplication of effort
and stale PPAs.

Feel free to join Monty, Soren and me and help bootstrapping this team.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~openstack-ppa
[2] https://launchpad.net/openstack-ppa
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-ppa

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack