[pkg-eucalyptus-maintainers] [Debian] Updating euca2ools to 1.3.1 ?

[Steffen Möller]

Dear Neil, dear Charles,

Firstly, thank you both for bringing the euca2ools up again.  I am also
CCing
Rudy, who has new packages of Eucalyptus 2.x under his fingers. For him I
am also leaving all the text in, inlining just a bit below.

On 07/01/2011 02:29 AM, Neil Soman wrote:
> Greetings Charles,
>
> please see inline.
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Charles Plessy <plessy at debian.org> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> perhaps it is time to update euca2ools to 1.3.1 in Debian.  Among the points
>> that made me postpone this work, there is the large set of patches applied on
>> the Ubuntu package, that are not used by Eucalyptus to update euca2ools on
>> http://open.eucalyptus.com/downloads.  I do not have a good enough knowledge of
>> euca2ools to review these patches, and as a general philosophy in Debian, I do
>> not apply patches blindly.  Perhaps some of you remember the « OpenSSL
>> incident » (DSA-1571-1), that affected only Debian because of a local patch.
>>
>> So I have two questions.
>>
>> First, if I upgraded Debian's package to version 1.3.1, would it cause
>> significant difficulties to the current users of the package.  In particular,
>> we need to pay attention that at the next Debian stable release, in 2012 or
>> 2013, the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3.1 must be supported and as automatic as
>> possible.
> This I can't answer directly, but I know that 1.3.1 includes a number
> of useful fixes over 1.2 and we recommend all users upgrade to that.
> On that note, we provide a package for squeeze at
>
> http://open.eucalyptus.com/downloads.
>
> This is based off of this code:
> https://code.launchpad.net/~eucalyptus-maintainers/euca2ools/euca2ools-1.3-lp
>
> I am not sure if the above code base includes all of the changes that
> Ubuntu developers have made. The above package is what most of our
> Debian users seem to be using.
In an ideal world, you would not want to have your own repository at
http://open.eucalyptus.com/downloads and use Debian's resources,
instead. And Debian and Ubuntu would be synchronised. We are apparently
fairly far from that. If there is anything coming to your mind on how to
improve that situation - tell us, please.
>> Second, how critical are the patches appliend in Ubuntu and is there any plan
>> at Eucalyptus to apply or cherry-pick some of them to make a 1.3.2 update ?  Or
>> are these patches very Ubuntu-specific ?
> As far as going forward, we have already picked up most of these (and
> fixed the ones that were distro specific), but haven't pushed out a
> new version. The plan is to release euca2ools 1.4 (I assume that is
> what it will be called) along with Eucalyptus 3.x in a few months (by
> the end of the year at the latest).
>
> That will be based off of this code base, which is the current
> development branch:
> https://code.launchpad.net/~eucalyptus-maintainers/euca2ools/euca2ools-main
Historically this is what we always did, right? We took it from the
trunk IIRC.
> Hope that helps.
In my mind, and from what I read in Charles eMail he might concur, the
Debian package should look exactly the way you want it to look. Debian
does not do extra development and if it does, it goes through the hands
of upstream. That is why Charles did not just apply the patches from Ubuntu.

What would be the version number of your development branch? Is it
1.3.99.bzr.`date`? Or is it too early to call it anyway near 1.4? And, we
need some better maintenance on the Debian side of the package. I am
just not using clouds that much myself these days, I must admit.

Many greetings to you all

Steffen