[lxc-devel] How close are we to 0.9.0 alpha3 or better?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Sat, 2013-01-19 at 19:45 -0500, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> On 01/19/2013 06:53 PM, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> > Hey all...
> > 
> > I don't see that we've got a firm roadmap in place of milestones to
> > cross or blockers to get out of our way but...
> > 
> > I had this concern when we cut 0.8.0, without certain critical systemd
> > features, that the next cut would take too long.  I understand and
> > understood that Daniel is very busy, as are we all.  That hasn't
> > changed.
> > 
> > At this point, lxc is flat out broken on several distributions thanks to
> > systemd (pivot_root / MS_SHARE incompatibility).  More recently, Fedora
> > 17 updated systemd to a version that breaks lxc where it was working
> > previously established Fedora 17 hosts.  What was working is now no
> > longer working.  This is very bad.
> > 
> > Serge and I corresponded over a cleaner answer to the pivot_root problem
> > and that may be addressed in a future patch down the road.  The current
> > solution may be a bit on the ugly side but it works.  The clean up for
> > that and the mount table may wait for another release.
> > 
> > What is left in our way to cut an alpha3 a beta or an rc?  Seriously?
> > This is an alpha.  Can we throw a stake in the ground can cut another
> > one?  We just got a report on the -user list where 0.9.0 alpha2 was
> > failing on an updated Fedora 17, which is exactly what I would expect
> > having experienced it myself.  As soon as we can throw a tag on it,
> > someone can throw a bugzilla ticket on it on Fedora (and elsewhere) and
> > say THEY are broken and HERE is the fix.
> > 
> > What's holding us up at this point?
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Mike

> Hi,

> From one of my previous e-mails to this list:
> """
> 0.9.0.alpha1 - December
> 0.9.0.alpha2 - February
> 0.9.0.rc1    - March
> ... as many rc as needed to fix any major issue
> 0.9.0
> """

> Now, alpha2 was tagged by mistake, so alpha2 above is really alpha3, but
> the rest still makes sense.

Concur and now I do remember more of that discussion, now that you
mention it.  In light of a discussion Serge and I were having over the
systemd patch just recently, I actually see a tight schedule ahead for
me to look at some code, I have not stuck my nose in, per his suggestion
wrt systemd and the mount table cleanups.

> The goal for 0.9.0 is to have all the remaining configuration and API
> bits in, which we're still pretty far off at the moment as the Bionic
> and systemd problems have been taking a significant amount of time from
> the people who are working on the remaining bits of the API and on the
> configuration rework.

I have had no involvement in the API bits and, if I've been able to take
some of the load off you and Serge for the systemd testing and patching,
I've been happy to contribute in my own way.

> The longer term plan is to have 1.0 release with a stable, versioned
> API, so it's crucial that as much of the major work for this is done in 0.9.

> As for the systemd situation, the vast majority of our users are
> currently using upstart (ubuntu, rhel, oracle), sysvinit (debian, older
> rhel, older oracle, ...) or some other init systems (busybox, ...) that
> aren't as broken as systemd.

Concur as well.  I just wish systemd hadn't run off the tracks with this
and that Fedora 17 hadn't updated to that brokenness and now we have
Fedora 18 out there as well (as well as Arch and others).

> So although I'm clearly happy to review and merge any sensible (and I
> stress the sensible part here) fixes for the systemd situation, I have
> no plan on altering the release schedule for it or spend any of my own
> time on issues created by upstream systemd changes.

> I hope this clarifies the situation a bit. Those plans have been
> discussed in public on this mailing-list, though on a bunch of separate
> e-mail threads (look for the API, 0.9.0alpha1 pull request, ...) so
> hopefully the above helps summarize this.

That helps immensely, for me.  Thank you for taking the time to clarify
that in a way that can be communicated to others.

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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