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Hi,

Below is my view, Mike and Jon are welcome to correct me if needed.

On 03/14/2012 06:27 AM, Todd Deshane wrote:
> Looks like the Debian repos on Xen.org are out of date. I'm not sure
> if the intention was to drop them once the packages got into SID or if
> they would be staging/unstable packages that existed before they got
> picked up by SID...(adding Mike and Jon to the CC to clarify).

I think that was the plan yes, and that Mike didn't update the xen.org
repositories.

> The
> wiki does include adding a line for the Debian experimental repo,

That became completely wrong, and can potentially be harmful.

> so
> the packages in it would be used instead of the Xen.org repo since
> they are newer.

There's nothing in Debian experimental that a user would need, and
nothing XCP related either. Everything is in Debian SID / testing.

>> I don't know for Ubuntu though, but I suspect it should be the same.
>> Maybe you know better, and can tell me what the status is in Ubuntu?
> 
> There is an xcp-xapi package (and its dependencies) in 12.04 universe.

The problem is that the Ubuntu package is outdated. It's version 1.3-15,
when SID has 1.3.2-3. If someone has contacts with Ubuntu people, it'd
be worth asking them to pull the package from SID. Sending a bug report
on Launchpad for that would be worth. Note that I personally don't care
at all about the state in Ubuntu, so I wont do this work.

> The Ubuntu PPA is up-to-date and is the right place for Ubuntu users
> that want the latest packages going forward.

I'd be very careful if having XCP in Ubuntu proper, but having an
outdated (buggy) package. Potentially, this may harm XCP users who will
not know that they should use the PPA.

> I believe the packages in
> the PPA are always a couple weeks ahead of the packages that are in
> Ubuntu universe.

The PPA has version 1.3.2-1, which is about 2 months old it's missing
few fixes (taken from debian/changelog, only the Ubuntu relevant parts):

* Added /etc/xen as an empty directory for xcp-networkd (Closes: #663352).
* xcp-networkd depends on openvswitch-datapath-dkms
* Fix bug in vif hotplug script which prevented vm shutdowns

I'd worry only about that last issue, which is really a blocker. The
patch is here:

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-xen/xen-api.git;a=blob;f=debian/patches/fix-vif-script;h=690e6ae5072c258b36699ef89815882a218c196a;hb=e9990da415a88f5f08b236a70e25630351552b2f

> Once Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Wheezy go stable we'll want to update the
> wiki to be explicit about what is in the distros and what is not,

I believe you can already do that, at least for SID/wheezy. Note that
Debian 7.0 Wheezy is planned to be frozen next June.

> but
> I think we'll always have development packages that will be available
> for testers/early adopters in Debian SID and the PPA.

Early testers, IMO, should use Git:
git clone https://github.com/xen-org/xen-api.git

Then, you should make sure to have both master and debian branches, get
in the debian branch, and do:
git-buildpackage

> I'm assuming
> that stable packages will be maintained in Wheezy and that development
> packages will be maintained in Debian SID right?

Right, that's how it is always done in Debian. I hope that Citrix will
decide that a long term support (2/3 years) will start after Ubuntu
12.04 is released, and that fixes will always be pushed there. Also, we
can sometimes do some Wheezy backports if we need newer features.
backports.debian.org is now officially part of Debian! I'd be happy to
provide / maintain Wheezy backports later.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)