[aur-general] Openstack discussion

[Lance Chen]

Hello there,

OpenStack has been a popular project ever since it became mature. It is well
packaging and testing in several major distributions[1], such as Debian, Ubuntu,
OpenSUSE, and Redhat. Arch Linux being a minimal distribution, is
actually pretty
suitable for deploying cloud service in my opinion. I say we should leverage the
simplicity to make Arch Linux dominant in the area of cloud service. There are
two problems we have to solve first to keeping moving on.

First, the branching problem, as nekinie mentioned. OpenStack maintains three
branches[1] simultaneously, stable, under development, and security-supported.
I suggest that we maintain the former two, stable and under development. And
append "-dev" or "-devel" to the name of developing one.

Second, the same old story, dependency problem. OpenStack is developed under
python, so it has a lot of python package dependencies. The problem is, many
of these dependencies have a limit of upper bound version. For example,
ceilometer, one of OpenStack packages, has a dependency of python2-alembic
between version 0.4.1 and 0.6.4. However, we have 0.6.4 in AUR. Creating a
temporary 0.6.3 package is totally not acceptable in Arch packaging standards.
This is a reason that I still have ceilometer in my trunk instead of
submitting it to
AUR. Similar problems exist in some ruby packages, too. We may better come up
with a solution to this kind of problem.

BTW, it is great news that the next version of AUR is going to support
split packages.
OpenStack projects are usually packaging in split package style.

[1] http://docs.openstack.org/
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Releases

Cheers,
Lance Chen aka Lance0312

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 7:48 PM, James Bulmer <nekinie at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Openstack is a collection of projects aimed at providing a opensource
> solution to cloud infrastructure deployment and management, It's similar to
> products such as Proxmox, Virt-manager and Vmware.
>
> The projects that contribute to Openstack are tightly linked through a set
> of API's, and like most projects these API's change as newer versions are
> released
>
> You will find most of the Openstack packages in the AUR, but no one has
> followed a set naming scheme so the packages are from different
> incompatible branches. Deploying Openstack from the AUR is not achievable
> at this point in time due to this
>
> A number of maintainers and users have noticed the issue, I have created
> this email to highlight the issue and kick start a discussion to solve it.
>
> Lance0312 has suggested using the raw package name (nova, glance, kesytone
> ect) for the stable (currently havana) branch, and appending -dev to all
> development branches (currently ice-house)
>
> Another issue is the lack of information in the Wiki relating to Openstack,
> due to this Lance0312 has created
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenStack (yet to be populated)
>
> Regards
>
> -- James aka nekinie