Hi Zack, On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 04:01:42PM -0400, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote: > > but honestly I'm not all that eager to continue what feels like petty > > quibbling about the status quo since we all want the same basic > > outcome here and nobody's acting in bad faith. Lucas's original > > wording was AIUI not intended as a final judgment but as a starting > > point. > > I've no idea why you took it that way, but I can assure you that I had > very productive reasons to ask the questions I've asked, far from being > "petty quibbling". If I expressed myself badly, giving you that > impression, I apologize.
No need - I was actually referring to my own comments as "petty quibbling", not your questions. :) The ways I thought the EC2 image deviate from what might be official from Debian's perspective, even if they were real, were so small they didn't bother me, so my points felt petty to me even while they seemed to be the accurate answers to your questions. > So, what I've had in mind since very long time (as readers of this list > know) is to advertise more broadly than we currently have done the > "official" images we have. Therefore the reasons for my questions was to > understand if, as you seemed to believe, none of the current images we > currently have qualify for some official communication by the project. I didn't actually say or mean that - I said "most or all" [of the three public cloud image types] seemed not to qualify as "official Debian". The EC2 images are the ones which I was least sure about, and indeed they seem either official or quite close to it. This is much less obvious for the other two. I was also making my comment in reference to Lucas' original definition (revisions to that hadn't been shared yet), and the overall focus of my comment was "let's communicate officially even though they aren't official images, since we already do for the unofficial Debian ISOs with firmware". We agree official communication is totally reasonable. The Google Compute Engine images have a few issues to address before they might qualify as official from Debian's perspective, though I'm pleased that they're close enough to be called Debian. As for Windows Azure, http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/WindowsAzureImage makes it clear that to follow the Azure build instructions, you have to follow directions maintained by Joyent in their GitHub space to compile a non-Debian version of Node.js, after which you use Node.js's package manager npm to obtain azure-cli from non-Debian repositories. This seems like it fails any reasonable definition of Debian maintenance of build tools. Some might also be concerned by the requirement for Azure credentials to build an image. > From this sub-thread, which I consider quite productive in fact, I think > we can conclude that at least the EC2 images "roughly qualify". The EC2 images definitely roughly qualify, which is why I felt like I was engaging in "petty quibbling" by focusing on the "roughly" when you asked why they might not strictly qualify. James, Anders et al have done great work. > There are things that can be done better, certainly, and in particular: > [...] > Do we agree that, once the above is done, the EC2 images would be fine > for being Debian-stamped? Note that I do agree that having a proper > *package* of build-debian-cloud would be even better, but I note that > that's a higher quality standard than the rest of the Debian toolchain, > which IMHO shouldn't be a blocker. I agree it seems fine to me at that point, though Lucas hasn't yet said in this thread whether he is okay with Debian hosting an official image build tool on GitHub instead of Alioth (see the wording he put on his draft wiki page today and your reply on April 24 to ambiguity in his original definition). It doesn't bother me strongly since every git checkout is a complete copy of the repository, so if GitHub were to vanish we'd just have to upload somewhere else. My guess is Lucas finds this non-ideal but acceptable (me too), even though he hasn't said so. So, yes, "seems mostly or entirely fine to me, with somewhere between zero and few shortcomings depending on definitions, most of which are minor and easily fixed if anyone cares." See why I found it counterproductive to focus on that? :) We've all progressed the discussion more usefully in other ways, and have also agreed from the beginning of this tangent that we should provide official mention of the public cloud Debian images, even the ones which aren't fully official. > Now, that's for the EC2 images, only because I'm a little bit more > familiar with them than with the other ones. I'd love if people > familiar with Azure and GCE images can do similar analyses and report > here, at least what the major blockers wrt the criteria as we understand > them up to now. My understanding of the Google Compute Engine images' official status blockers are here: http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/GoogleComputeEngineImage (I partially overhauled the page six days ago). Please add, remove, or change as appropriate. One goal my colleagues and I share for DebConf13 is to figure out a path forward regarding the several packaging issues which works for both Debian and Google. That's the kind of issue where in-person discussion, mutual understanding, and collaboration can help a lot. It's good at least that there are no freeness issues to address - all of that software is already under a suitable license. I haven't examined the Azure images closely and don't know what other blockers might exist. > > It's probably more productive to refine the list of requirements Lucas > > has kindly recorded in the wiki, maybe culminating in a discussion/BoF > > at DC13, and to work to address outstanding issues. Any email > > pre-discussion should probably be under a more descriptive subject > > than "Adding cloud-init in the next Wheezy point release", too. :) > > I totally agree that would be useful as well. Feel free to start a > thread on that, I'll be happy to participate :-) FWIW, I think that > benchmarking the current images against our current understanding of the > criteria (as I propose above) would actually be synergistic with what > you propose here. Yup, sounds like we agree. - Jimmy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAJbdudVBAC1Qh5ZOy=wska15xov4llhrjwfsacmcwaebcts...@mail.gmail.com
