[Pkg-ofed-devel] New sources for RDMA upstream

Ana Guerrero Lopez ana at debian.org
Wed Sep 14 22:06:34 UTC 2016


Hi Jason,

While the Debian OFED team is mainly me, there are other people
contributing from time to time and I'd like encourage them to reply
if they have something to add and do not take this reply as any kind
of "Debian reply", it's my personal view.


On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 12:36:21PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> Hello Debian Maintainers,
> 
> We (the upstream of many of the RDMA packages) are re-organizing how
> we deliver the source code. Instead of > 20 small repositories we are
> combining the tree into a single source.
> 
> A preview is available on my github here:
> 
>  https://github.com/jgunthorpe/rdma-plumbing
> 
> When it goes live the tree will be available under a team repository
> on github. It will take some time for all the patches in the preview
> to be fully reviewed into the official repo, and several are necessary
> for the sample Debian packaging to work correctly.
> 
> You can read more on the subject in the discussion on the linux-rdma
> mailing list:
> 
>   http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg39026.html
>   http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg39328.html
>   http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg40014.html
>   http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-rdma/msg40086.html

I read linux-rdma from time to time, I was aware of this discussion and
I was waiting for your mail reaching packagers :-)

[...]
> To help smooth things along I've prepared some sample Debian
> packaging that is in-tree. It follows the latest packaging that Debian
> unstable uses, not the packaging that pre-existed in-tree.
> 
> This can be used as a reference for the official packaging, I do not
> wish to be a Debian Maintainer again :)

I'm well aware of your former involvement with the Debian project,
you'll already know of some of my points below, allow me to list them
for readers who are not familiar with Debian.

While I understand the rationale from upstream to make a single source
repository and release it all at the same time, it doesn't really make
Debian's packager life easier. I'd continue packaging things individually
and that's likely to mean more work since I'd have to split the code.

Bundling it all together makes the packaging quite more complex -as your
packaging shows- and the day to day maintenance is also more burdensome.
This will raise the Debian contribution bar even more.

With the big tarballs every time there is a release, it will take a lot
of more of time reviewing all the code, possible copyright changes,
packaging updates...
Every time there is a soname change, it'll delay the availability of
all the packages, since the package suffers a rename and it has to be
processed manually, the same goes every time there is a new component.
If there is a building problem, it also delays the full stack.

If it were the case where the full stack is needed, it might make sense,
but it's not the case with all the drivers you're bundling together.

I am also not a fan of CMake, I used to work in the Qt/KDE maintenance in
Debian where is used.


[...]

> I invite you to participate in the upstream community and ensure that
> Debian is well represented. If you wish to take over the debian/
> directory upstream and maintain the core packaging there (as Roland
> did), I'm sure that would be welcomed by the team.


I have had a few contributions in linux-rdma in the past :)
I really can't compete with people who is paid to do this, as Roland did.
My maintenance of OFED in Debian is done partly on my free time and partly in
my daily work time where I'm not paid to do this, but given we use
Mellanox OFED, we can re-use some things. I'm hoping for the next release
of Debian to have a decent OFED support and also I would like to introduce a
few new packages (hfi1 at least is on my list) but I might not make it.
I revamped the team a couple of years ago, with the hope that eventually
others interested would have joined. It's not happening and I might give up
soon.

Ana




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