Hi,
On 16-10-12 10:45, Noa Resare wrote:
Hello friends,
I've been tasked with looking into the possibility of running cloudstack on
Debian stable, and based on my preliminary investigations I have a few
questions that I hope that someone can answer.
I've been trying the same, but I gave up. Debian stable is far behind at
this point with the packages, for example libvirt is version 0.8.3,
while CloudStack currently requires 0.9.4 at least.
The work I done on the Debian packages makes sure they work on Ubuntu
12.04 and on Debian Unstable.
* What is the long term plan for the build system? Right now we use Make
(debian/rules), waf, maven and ant and that setup doesn't exactly lend
itself to a gentle learning curve. Also, it builds everything (at least)
twice.
This hasn't been decided yet in total, but my idea would be (deb):
* dpkg (debian/rules) calls maven with sbindir, sysconfdir args, etc
* maven outputs a completely build tree in build/usr/sbin,
build/etc/cloud, etc, etc
* dpkg then fetches the files from build/* into the required packages.
* Using maven for populating the deps directory, with repositories and
transitive dependencies has a bad habit of breaking in surprising ways.
Since third party pom files can inject repository references to
repositories that returns bad data it's a fragile process. I'd like to
spend some time improving this, and there are a few ways of doing it, none
of which is obviously the right way to go. Where would I ideally direct my
efforts?
* There are some dependencies to specific versions of some java
dependencies not available in Debian squeeze (commons-codec, log4j). What
is the rationale for adding those as dependencies instead of pulling the
exact version that we want via maven, since we are downloading >100M of
dependencies anyway?
I wanted to keep the packages as small (in size) as possible. As a
package maintainer/build I also think that you shouldn't package what
the repository from that distribution is already providing.
It could conflict with already installed packages. That could be
resolved by prefixing it with cloud-, but that would be wasting space.
Somebody might want to run their CloudStack hypervisor from a small (4G,
8G) flash-drive or just in memory. Size does matter there.
I don't like packaging anything redundantly, so that's why we have the
dependency on external packages.
What we could do for supporting older distributions is backporting some
parts or supplying it ourselfs, with dpkg (and probably rpm) you can
depend on package A or B, so we could have:
* libjava-commons-codec
* cloud-libcommons-codec
Our packages could depend on either one of those.
In my opinion it would be very hard to get CloudStack Debian Stable.
The main problem is that CloudStack is a fast evolving project and we
are going to do our first release under ASF.
We have now decided that we will support Ubuntu 12.04 and RHEL 6.3 and
going forward from that.
I think we should keep supporting Ubuntu 12.04 at least until 14.04
(next LTS) comes out, users need stability in this.
Does this make any sense?
Wido
