Hi all,
the Linux-HA project is undergoing some changes, as you've noticed. Not
all of them have gone as well as expected, and it hasn't stabilized
yet.
Under guidance with Alan, the project members have met and decided to
change the governance of the project in the future. This will be
announced in more detail soon, stay tuned.
We also want to likely make some further changing to the package layout,
and understand that users, admins and distro maintainers dislike it when
we do that, so we don't want to make it a habit.
We recognize the needs of our users (I hope!) to receive timely updates,
and thus have decided to go ahead and propose releasing one more 2.1.4
(following the 2.1.x package layout) as the last release of that branch
before the restructuring kicks in completely.
(When we decided to split off pacemaker, we didn't expect that this
would cause the upstream Linux-HA project to cease releasing
completely, and unfortunately there's been little discussion on the
lists regarding this since.)
For SLE10 SP2, it was already too late to change the package layout, so
I've been backporting changes (which is quite easy with Mercurial) from
the Pacemaker project, the GUI, and heartbeat-dev into the 2.1.x
codebase, and done a fair amount of testing on x86, x86-64, s390x.
However, I've been mostly focused on cherry picking what we (as in,
Novell) needed, so in particular the packaging for non-SUSE dists is
somewhat neglected in this version.
If other distro maintainers would please help me with fixing up the
packaging, and more community members would pound on it, I would really
appreciate this.
My proposal would be to release 2.1.4 by the end of next week
(2008-04-18). (Mostly because after that I go on vacation ;-)
I know this is a highly condensed schedule and doesn't follow any
"proper" release methodology. The reasons for this in bullet points:
- It's been too long since the last "official" gasp from the heartbeat
project. The code we have is clearly better than 2.1.3, and we should
get it to our users ASAP.
- Novell has done a fair amount of testing on it already. The code is
good (as in "much better than 2.1.3"), except the packaging.
- The new governance will eventually decide on a new release methodology
for the Linux-HA project, I expect, but this will take some more
weeks, and I don't want to delay releasing even further.
So, with the above reasoning, I'm volunteering myself - and hijacking
the vacuum, I acknowledge - to do the 2.1.4 release, as the current
split hasn't been adopted everywhere yet, 2.1.x is defunc, and our user
community appears to need it "now" and not in several months.
I'd plan on building the packages for all dists via OBS, if nobody holds
any strong objections and update the DownloadSoftware page after we
agree that the 2.1.4 release is good.
And of course would be much approving of distro maintainers pulling it
into their official distro repositories too!
So, that said, I've pushed my proposed code to
http://hg.linux-ha.org/lha-2.1/. It, for reasons outlined above, likely
doesn't build yet (because the in-tree packaging is broken), but I
wanted to share the scope of changes with you.
